It’s hard to believe that a green comet contains carbon atoms older than our planetary system, or that fruit flies can count. And that’s a good thing, because science provides irrefutable evidence that can be understood without the need for belief.
She began with a phrase that’s not typically used to launch a scientific discussion. The researcher with whom I had been laboriously tracking every movement and trembling wing of 1,243 fruit flies for several days put her head around the door of the preparation area and exclaimed: “You’ll never believe it!” She was waving a slightly crumpled roll of paper covered in red lines and columns. Myriad points—a galaxy of the genomes of our tiny buzzing friends. Somewhere in this thicket of numbers and data lurked the unbelievable. And apparently, sprawled as it was across a wad of printed sheets, it was enough to overwhelm a level-headed researcher.
Hard Facts
Researchers often pride themselves on not succumbing to weaknesses such as shock or disbelief during their ascent of the career ladder. After all, belief is the domain of metaphysics—that which is immeasurable and hard to calculate. Science has no need for it. The research process itself has been structured in such a way that essentially, belief has no place there. By following the rules of science and their chosen methodology, the researcher eradicates their need to “believe” in what they are trying to discover or describe. First, they patiently and methodically explore the gaping holes in the elaborate structure of expertise. They look for anchor points, understatements missed by previous explorers, suspended trains of thought and questions left irritatingly unanswered. This gradual ripening toward the adoption of a scientific concept is often a long and arduous process. Then they discover the concept’s shortcomings, and notice the inaccuracies in their own reasoning. The idea, turned over and over in the researcher’s mind, becomes ordinary in its own way. It grows alongside them, becomes a habit, a reflex triggered in the brain upon waking. From just the seed of an idea, the starting point of a long road, a hypothesis begins to solidify. “Believing” in it is no longer necessary; personal opinion is set aside. Time to verify this hypothesis.
The falsification of scientific speculations, a process called hypothesis testing, is the crux of the scientific method and the reason why there is little room in science for belief. Even if the reality being studied is by definition hard to accept or perceive at first glance. In the mid-19th century, an English naturalist made it quite convincingly clear that evolution simply had to happen in certain situations. Yes, it happens slowly, and we are not capable of directly observing it during our fast-paced human lives. Therefore, we have to believe in its strength—and in the reasoning of a certain Mr. Darwin. The same is true in another area of knowledge: take the particle accelerator ominously named the Large Hadron Collider. It sits like a fat grub curled up in a perfect circle somewhere deep beneath the Earth’s surface, straddling the border of France and Switzerland. It is said to gobble up handfuls of particles rushing almost as fast as light. Reportedly, they collide with each other in microscopic explosions, recreating forgotten moments from the history of our universe. And apparently, all of this is perfectly safe; there is no danger of a voracious black hole arising, or a gate to another dimension opening. We simply have to believe those crazy physicists—and quantum physics, according to which a particle can be in two places at once, and a cat can purr happily and be dead at the same time.
Although in these and certain other situations it would make sense to accept the smallness of man, the shortcomings of our senses and mind, our inability to see for ourselves the truth of all these scientific wonders and simply rely on belief, the researcher does no such thing. What’s more, they have the audacity and insolence to invite others—in fact, the whole world—to share in this “disbelief.” They do it because they know that in science, you don’t take anything for granted. All one must do is confront the question stoically, come up with a hypothesis, and then throw it into the jaws of a greedy experiment. If they fail trying, but the hypothesis emerges from testing unscathed, we come one step, one millimeter closer to knowing the truth about the world (or at least a tiny piece of it), all without having to take somebody’s word for it.
Sometimes, actually meeting head-on with a hypothesis undergoing test after test can be shocking. My colleague was rightly amazed by our fruit flies, which we had been tracking in mazes and tiny arenas for weeks. As it turned out, they could count! Would you believe it? Of course you would, especially after I told you in detail about the experiment and explained why this particular result could only mean one thing. There would be no room for belief, beyond the rhetorical exclamation of the preoccupied experimenter.
Don’t get me wrong. What I’m saying here is not an attack on belief in the supernatural, a ruthless clash of science with religion and metaphysics. Scientists needn’t be denied such beliefs, nor stigmatized for them—because by believing (in the religious sense), they are doing something that is “next to” science and essentially has nothing to do with it. The very definition of what an experiment is means that it is inapplicable to metaphysics or the foundations of religious belief. There is nothing wrong or shocking about this—it is just that science stands on the border of a land to which not only is it denied access, but it would also never try to enter. Why barge in somewhere where our methods would be ineffective, when elsewhere there is a world of the greatest wonders and marvels just waiting for the curious prods of scientific tools?
Disappointments
So why has there been so much talk lately of people not believing in science? Several hundred years of science in practice, and 100% effectiveness (sooner or later) in rejecting erroneous ideas and hypotheses—are these not sufficient arguments for abandoning the notion of “faith in science” and simply trusting it? After all, the scientific method, even when encased in the intimidatingly complex theories of philosophers and thinkers, is still based on a fabulously simple foundation. Come up with a problem. As accurately as you can, try to predict what should happen if the problem describes the universe correctly. And then just see if it happens.
However, as is usually the case in life, the reality is more complicated, and for some time we have been practicing science in a way that is hard to understand, especially when we expect this understanding from a broad swathe of society. As a researcher myself, I’m not always able to step out of my role, stand by and look through the eyes of the average Joe at something that, in my opinion, requires no faith at all. But when I do, it is hard not to freak out. For we, as scientists, are priests of a new type of temple to which no one but us has access. Even if we occasionally let outsiders in (as I do at science festivals or university open days, for example), we rarely show them science as it is practiced on a daily basis. After all, it’s easy to make a few generalizations and fire a shoo-in experiment out of a test tube. It’s much more difficult, in the company of guests, to raise numerous scientific doubts, anticipate stumbling blocks, recall unexpected plot twists, and explore unintended paths. When we state our theories—and especially when we use them to support difficult or controversial decisions and stances—we rarely try hard enough to explain everything completely. Besides, to whom are we meant to be explaining it? The schools attended by the adults of today barely touched on how science works, what can and can’t be expected from it. And why it’s usually right. Nobody can blame average Joe for not believing in science, let alone trusting researchers.
As a matter of fact, resentment and lack of trust are not sentiments that erode science exclusively from the outside. We researchers also have crises of “faith.” The specific form of market capitalism that has ruled science since the 18th century clearly defines the currencies that are used to pay for research success. These are as follows: the uniqueness of the discovery, its innovativeness, and whether it gets published in a prestigious journal. “Publish or perish”—this is the mantra with which young researchers enter the world of science. Paradoxically, it is this quest for unprecedentedness that has turned many fields of science into caricatures of their former glory. Driven by completely understandable motives—the desire for fame, success, recognition—scientists consciously (to varying degrees) filter the results of their research, releasing only a carefully selected sample to the public. They show the world their success stories, perfected to the very last detail. As hard as it is to believe, this pursuit of sensationalism has led to a surprising result: in many disciplines, scientific evidence has ceased to be reproducible. After all, how many epoch-making, spectacular results can there be in one field? Their constant influx means that more and more of them are simply flukes or random fluctuations describing not so much reality as researchers’ expectations pushed to the limits of possibility.
“Great,” you’re thinking. “So if researchers have stopped believing in science, I guess we can quit, too? And why,” you continue, rightly indignant at this point, “don’t scientists talk about this? Why is popular science still full of nice, fat sentences, assurances about the effectiveness of this, ‘humanity’s greatest adventure’?” The answer is very simple: we do talk about it. At least, some of us—those who have been through a “crisis of faith” and embarked along the path of valor and change. Because it’s not like science has been irretrievably corrupted, and everything ever announced by researchers should be relegated to the realm of fairy tales. The problem that modern science has to address lies in people, and in no way does this undermine the fact that the scientific method works because it simply has to work. All we need to do is reset our approach to it. From the customer-consumer model, where good results and charts buy lifetime careers and places on the pages of leading journals, we need to return to the roots. To the conviction that there are no “bad results” or “unpublishable” studies. And to the knowledge that this is a wave that is increasingly flooding the world of science. In fields such as psychology or medicine—those that potentially have a much greater impact on human life than, for example, ornithology or astrophysics—it is practically a revolution. And as with revolutions, it will not render immediate results. But even now, only a dozen or so years since the emergence of the first alarming data about the non-reproducibility of research (meaning the inability to get the same results by repeating an experiment), science is curing itself. Journals are adopting transparent, more rigorous practices. Scientific societies are being set up to monitor the quality of science, and its healing. Through their conduct, the big names in research are creating an ethical precedent, a kind of unwritten code, the non-observance of which entails increasing exclusion from the scientific mainstream. This is how new trust is born—and this is also how the need to believe in something disappears. Except, perhaps, a belief in human honesty.
The Comet
“It’s funny about paths and rivers,” he mused. “You see them go by, and suddenly you feel upset and want to be somewhere else—wherever the path or the river is going, perhaps.” (Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland)
The night sky in January 2023 looked different than usual. Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)—quickly dubbed a green comet due to its emerald glow—scurried across it. I was unlucky, because at its peak of brightness I was in the southern hemisphere. The comet wasn’t due to arrive in “my” southern sky until the beginning of February. I scanned the night sky with my binoculars in the region of Mars, maroon and perfectly visible, not really knowing what I would see. I was hoping for a blurry, barely visible cloud of cosmic light, perhaps tinted with a greenish glow if I was lucky. I know that this color is evidence of the presence of carbon in the head of the comet. Bombarded by the solar wind, carbon atoms evaporate and consume energy, giving off part of it in the form of green light.
This is one of the so-called long-period comets. It has been heading toward us for some fifty thousand years. Once it passes the point at which it comes closest to the sun in its cometary life, it will shoot off into the darkness of space and won’t return to the vicinity of Earth for a few million years. Perhaps it will never be nearby again—that all depends on its fate after leaving the immediate vicinity of the sun. How do you even prepare for such a meeting? This comet carries carbon from before our planet was formed. None of these atoms have ever been, nor will they ever be, a component of any life here on Earth. To look at this comet is to see a sliver of ancient darkness in which the sun was just completing its formation and the first seeds of planets were being formed in absolute silence. Tens of thousands of years ago, this splinter of forgotten history basked in the darkness of the Oort Cloud, a giant collection of rock and ice surrounding the solar system. A random waver in its gravity snatched it from its long slumber and nudged it in the direction of the sun.
There is little we can do when confronted with witnessing a history so ancient it might as well be a forgotten eternity. We can’t touch it. We can’t catch a whiff of wet soot, nor hear the crackle of ice layers shattering as the comet’s head plummets along the thread of its orbit toward the scorching sun. We can only hungrily seize upon photons of green light torn from its atmosphere by the solar wind, savor them with spectroscopes, run them through filters, in order to learn something about the history of this unannounced visitor. Can I allow myself to forget about scientific accuracy at a time like this, and just be alone with the comet? Believing that it won’t strike me, that it’s not bringing a pestilence, that it’s neither the tear of a god, nor the flaming sword of an angel? I think so. It’s my moment, I’ll do with it what I want. What if I catch hold of the comet, or want to run after it and see where its path ends? Well, then I’ll have no choice but to clear my throat loudly, plant my feet firmly on the ground, and defer to science. The type of science that simply explains what I see, not one that I have to struggle to believe. After all, it is science that has brought us further than any other human activity to date.
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