At every point in our quest to understand the world and universe — the one around us and the one within us — we can only start based on what we know and can imagine at present. We are biased by what we know and what we’re ignorant of, and we’re also influenced by the range of experiences that we’re aware of. Nobody has access to the full suite of evidence that all of humanity has ever collected, and even that full suite of evidence doesn’t shed light on all that exists and is possible within our Universe. Our knowledge is limited, and our theories that we’ve devised to explain, predict, and model reality are limited in numerous ways as well.
Even the very best of our best theories and ideas are far from complete, and in many instances, there are very popular, well-respected ideas in a variety of fields that are deeply flawed at best. So what can we do, and what should we do, when a respected theory runs up against a truth we’ve uncovered from our own lived experience? That’s what Onahmic Acharjya wants to know, asking:
“What do you do when a respected theory is false? Either I deny the validity of deeply respected scientific positions, or I deny the validity of my own immediate subjective experiences, and neither of those seem particularly good.”
For all of us, it’s important to remember that our own experiences and knowledge are limited. What any individual knows can never reflect the full, cumulative body of knowledge that the billions and billions of us all possess within us, much less an objective understanding of all of reality that goes beyond what humanity currently comprehends. It’s vital to be humble before our own ignorance, and so with that said, here’s what it might be helpful to keep in mind.
It’s important to start with the places where our confidence in our theories is the strongest: in the simplest scientific cases of all. Although we often speak about physics as being the most difficult or the most advanced of the sciences, the truth is that it’s actually the simplest of the sciences: the most fundamental and the one where we can investigate systems with the least amount of complexity. The reason we’ve been able to make so much progress in physics is because of this simplicity, and the fact that we were able to uncover an extremely powerful, useful, and valid set of models of reality all the way back in the 1600s.
Astronomy and physics, in many ways, were the first sciences. Linking the motion of the celestial bodies in the heavens to the mechanical motion of macroscopic objects here on Earth provided the framework that led from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Kepler and Galileo, and eventually to Isaac Newton, the law of universal gravitation, and Newtonian mechanics. The incredible power of Newton was how universally widely applicable his ideas were, how successful they were at modeling a huge variety of aspects about reality, and how extraordinarily the predictions borne from those rules matched reality in a quantitative fashion.
There are very, very few fields of science that — even today, in the 21st century — have achieved the same successful levels at modeling reality that Newtonian physics achieved in the late 17th century, more than 300 years ago. Only:
- on quantum scales,
- for nuclear reactions,
- at speeds approaching the speed of light,
- and for gravitational phenomena occurring in the immediate vicinity of an extremely heavy concentration of mass,
are even subtle departures from Newton’s predictions detectable. The incredible success of Newtonian mechanics, and of other classical theories of physics like thermodynamics and electromagnetism, led to an incredible number of scientific and technological breakthroughs. It also led Lord Kelvin, himself a towering figure of science, to explain what made a well-developed, successful model of reality like Newtonian physics so powerful back in a lecture in 1883:
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”
Credit: TxAlien/English-language Wikipedia
And yet, even physics — the most well-developed and deeply understood of all of the sciences — has its limitations, its mysteries, and its unresolved puzzles. Newtonian physics has a range of validity that it’s established over, and outside of that range, new ideas ranging from wave mechanics to quantum physics to quantum field theory to special and general relativity are required. No doubt that even the best and most established of those modern theories, including quantum field theory and general relativity, have their own limits, and beyond them, new ideas about reality will be required to answer questions such as, “what happens to the gravitational field of an electron as it passes through a double slit?”
However, as our knowledge and understanding of the Universe has advanced, it’s important to recognize that a lot of older ideas that have since been discredited continue to persist, even among well-educated professionals. Examples include:
- that comet tails are the causes of meteor showers, even though it’s the debris streams of comets and asteroids, while the tail material gets blown out of the Solar System,
- that major mergers between spiral galaxies typically create elliptical galaxies, even though they far more often create gas-rich disk galaxies,
- that accreting material from a giant star onto a white dwarf leads to a Type Ia supernova once the Chandrasekhar mass is exceeded, even though up to 100% of supernovae are caused instead by white dwarf mergers,
- and that space and time began with the hot Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, even though cosmic inflation precedes and sets up the hot Big Bang, and no one knows what came before the inflationary state.
Just because something is known by humanity doesn’t mean it’s known, accepted, used, or taught by all of the leaders in the field.
Many of the physical sciences are well-grounded in a sense that would please Lord Kelvin: they involve physical theories and models of reality that make quantitative predictions that fare favorably when compared with real world data. Chemistry, in many aspects, is just as well-developed of a theoretical and experimental science as physics is, despite an enormous increase in the complexity of the systems it typically considers. We understand how, dependent on conditions like temperature and pH, molecules of different species react together very well. But there are conspiracies about chemistry too, often widely-believed ones by authority figures: chemtrails, adenochrome, and the notion that water has a “memory” of chemicals it once came in contact with among them.
Geology, oceanography, and atmospheric science are also well-grounded in reality, where we have theories and models of a physical system where:
- terms are well-defined,
- measurements can be taken and well-quantified,
- there’s an underlying physical basis for it that’s rooted in reality,
- and predictions can similarly be quantified and compared against measured reality.
The reason theories like plate tectonics, sedimentary rock formation, and the structure of the Earth’s interior are so well-respected is because of the (in some cases, literally) mountains of evidence that support and bolster the ideas that are the bedrock of the understanding of our planet’s structure and evolution. (Oceanography and atmospheric science are on similarly firm footing.) Although there are often-successful efforts made to politicize or bring conspiratorial thinking into these arenas, the scientific fundamentals and theoretical foundations of these arenas are sound, and not seriously debated or questioned.
That’s similarly true in the “harder” among the biological life sciences. The fields of:
- evolutionary biology,
- ecology,
- virology,
- immunology,
- anatomy,
- genetics,
- and agriculture,
all serve as examples of scientific fields that are on extremely solid footing. However, there are large numbers of people — including significant numbers of fringe scientists — that spread and popularize blatant misinformation about these fields.
In evolutionary biology, a lot of people tout the importance of epigenetics as the vindication of Lamarckian evolution: a popular but flawed interpretation of the evidence that overlooks and downplays the vital role that Darwinian evolution, genetics, and DNA play in evolution.
In virology, many people still promote a scenario for the possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2: the disease that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. There are many who have great respect for the idea that gain-of-function research gave rise to this virus, despite an overwhelming suite of evidence written in the genetic code of the virus itself that disproves all laboratory origin scenarios for the virus.
And speaking of DNA, there’s a popular, and even well-respected (by some) idea that junk DNA is not actually junk. In fact, most LLMs will tell you about a “shifting scientific view” and tout “the results of the ENCODE project” to discuss the vital biological roles performed by “a significant portion of this non-coding DNA.” This is not true at all, and has been thoroughly debunked by biologist Larry Moran in his excellent book, What’s in your genome? 90% of Your Genome Is Junk. Sometimes, actual scientific truths face extreme difficulties in winning the war of public opinion.
This is an enormous problem in modern day medicine and public health, where the greatest public health advances of the 20th century — interventions ranging from vaccines, clean water, clean air, birth control/family planning aids, and fluoridated drinking water — are being actively undermined by the very authorities charged with advancing public health. Well-respected authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and many others.
It’s very, very difficult to get to the truth under those circumstances, and for you, an individual person with a human body, the stakes are extremely high: you have the responsibility of keeping your own human body safe and healthy. We are now in a situation where there’s an “infodemic” occurring: where misinformation from once-reputable sources has infiltrated the public consciousness, and where many authorities — doctors, scientists, federal agencies, and even Google (or LLM chatbots) — are providing only partially correct information, often mixed in with misinformation that still carries the weight of a prominent authority figure.
When we move away from the physical and life sciences and into the social and psychological sciences, things get even murkier. One area that’s generated a great amount of research is consciousness — highlighted in this recent Big Think issue — and yet while many ideas have gathered a great deal of respectability in the field, people who work on it do not even agree on a definition for what consciousness is. Is consciousness an output alone, or is it also based on inputs? Is there a mind-body connection that plays a role, and does unconscious processing matter just as much as (or even more than) conscious thought in our minds?
Consciousness research, arguably, is a field where the questions may be more important than the answers at this point. One key to note — and this can help you navigate a great many fields where you encounter respected but not necessarily true theories — is the lack of a scientific consensus. In an established scientific field, when an issue is widely agreed upon by an enormous variety of experts, that agreement is normally a product of an overwhelming suite of evidence supporting one specific conclusion as respects that issue. If that evidence is lacking, multiple valid conclusions could still be reached or would still be in play. The fact that there is a lack of consensus is usually, but not always, indicative that even something purported to be “well-respected” or “well-established” is not a decisively determined issue.
However, there are some fields where the very foundation of the field is shakier than others, leading to the formation of two camps:
- adherents, who all unify around a single consensus to defend the field’s existence and legitimacy itself,
- and critics, who point out that those foundations rely on assumptions that are not necessarily well-founded.
This applies to ideas that have been largely determined to be pseudoscience — astrology, personality classification based on the Meyers-Briggs categorization scheme, homeopathy, etc. — but it also applies to many ideas that have entered the mainstream with questionable but yet-to-be-determined scientific validity.
Acupuncture, chiropractic care, naturopathy, and evolutionary psychology all sit in a grey area: where the foundations of the idea itself are extremely questionable, but where there is an enormous amount of consensus among its adherents. Some people claim to be helped greatly by the first three, but controlled trials fail to reveal a measurable beneficial effect. Evolutionary psychology, meanwhile, claims that human psychological mechanisms are shaped by Darwinian evolution, yet has no way to distinguish which mechanisms, if any, fall into that category, as opposed to being determined by cultural, social, or environmental factors. It, too, lacks testability, and no genetic link has ever been established between such purported mechanisms.
There is, of course, a bias that occurs the more controversial and less empirical a field is: the people who are primarily drawn to or interested in it are likely to be enthusiasts, or people eager to become adherents, whereas skeptics are drawn to areas they have greater interest in. It would do us all well to remember that:
- many things that are not yet established to be true may yet turn out to have validity,
- many things that are widely agreed-upon will either be overturned or superseded as more evidence is gathered,
- many “corner cases” or outlier data points can often point out a flaw or incompleteness in an established idea, paving the way forward to a greater understanding,
- and that even our best theories and models of reality, today, only have a certain precision to which they’ve been established and a certain range of parameters over which they are valid.
All theories can, and likely will, be improved as we collect more and better data and deepen our understanding of how nature works. It would be very surprising for an experiment to ever overturn Newton’s laws for non-relativistic objects in free-fall on Earth, but if it turns out that we’re able to define a test that establishes that paramecia possess consciousness, that would be far less surprising. Passing peer review, as well, is no guarantee that a published scientific paper is correct. The best thing you can do is keep your mind open, and to remember that even experts who confidently make assertions may themselves be succumbing to exactly what Feynman warned about when he said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Send in your Ask Ethan questions to startswithabang at gmail dot com!
This article Ask Ethan: What should you do when a respected theory is false? is featured on Big Think.