What Is Science, Anyway?

With the COVID pandemic and climate change, science and scientists occupy a large slice of our daily news feed, and some of the scientific information we get seems confusing at best or even in conflict with something we learned just a few weeks ago.

You can stop wearing masks.

No, wait, put your masks back on.

What’s up with that?

The basics of how science works are really not all that complicated. Science is a defined process by which we gain knowledge or information on how things work based on obtaining facts, data, through experiments and unbiased observation. Experiments and observation are the basis of the scientific method, a series of steps that ask questions — Why? How does that work? What would happen if…? — and attempt to acquire information to answer the questions.

The scientific method may sound complicated, but we all use it every day in our normal lives. Here’s an example.

You get home from work and drop down in your favorite chair to read the mail. You switch on the reading lamp, but … no light.

“Hmmm,” you think, “the bulb must be burned out.”

You get a new light bulb from the pantry, put it in the socket, and flip the switch again. The light comes on.

Boom. You’re a scientist. You just completed the essential steps of the scientific method:

· Observation — The light doesn’t come on.

· Question — Why doesn’t the light come on?

· Hypothesis — The light doesn’t come on because the bulb is burned out.

· Experiment — Change the light bulb and turn the light on again.

· Data — The light comes on.

· Conclusion/Theory — The bulb was burned out and a functional bulb is needed for light.

Although the principles are the same, the questions professional scientists explore, like finding new treatments for rogue viruses or other diseases, are generally more complicated than your living room lamp. And doing real science, standing at the edge of the known and peering into the unknown, is demanding and time consuming.

Experiments designed to answer questions may not work because the question asked was off the mark, the experimental design was flawed, or a technical mistake was made. Sometimes the experimental results don’t make sense, or the scientist doesn’t understand what sense they make. Sometimes more experiments are needed to produce results that are informative.

There are two additional key features of science:

1. There is always unknown.

2. There is always uncertainty.

Even when experimental questions are answered, those answers nearly always raise more questions — there is continually more to know. In the biomedical world, there will always be new or existing diseases to find better treatments for or even cure. COVID, for example, came out of the blue, and the waxing and waning of infections continues to challenge scientists.

The uncertainty piece, that absolute truth is hard to come by, can be unsettling. The explanation of a phenomenon, a theory, is based on existing data. In many cases, a major change in that theory is unlikely based on the quantity and confidence of existing data. It’s hard to imagine new information coming along that tells us cigarettes are good for us.

In other cases, like dealing with a previously unknown virus, every day brings fresh data. As of February of this year, more than 87,000 scientific papers dealing with COVID had been published.(1) These findings impact not only our understanding of the virus, but also the public health behaviors necessary to mitigate it. That etched-in-stone certainty is rare may seem frustrating, but scientific theories are always put forward, revised, and improved as new insights appear. This is how science moves forward.

The uncertainty is also part of the reason science is a communal activity that examines questions in a continual and self-correcting process. Individual scientists generate verifiable data, and through a rigorous publication process they share those results with other scientists who assess if the conclusions are correct or need to be revised. Those experts then use those findings to develop and refine their own experiments, generating new data that can cause conclusions to be modified.

This iterative process reaches toward an unbiased consensus about how the natural world works. Moving to consensus, when “the overwhelming majority of qualified professionals all hold the same consistent opinion,”(2) may be the most essential feature of science.

Details may change, but the science-based evidence for climate change and its potentially catastrophic impact on the human race has been consistent for years. It’s only been ignored by some for short-term gain. Yes, the nuances of dealing with COVID change, but in record time science generated a vaccine that is safe and effective. Those choosing to not get the vaccine, or worse yet, propagating misinformation about it despite a data-driven consensus of experts, are now learning the peril of ignoring the validity of the scientific process.

1 Jeff Grabmeier; Ohio State News; February 23, 2021.

2 Ethan Siegel, Forbes, July 30, 2020.

(This story appeared in the VTDigger.)