The source of all my power (I love science, part 2)

The Hubble space telescope was launched, in part, to establish a more accurate value for Hubble's constant, the measure of how fast the universe is expanding.  That part of its mission was only half successful, or possibly, doubly successful, as the HST did measure Hubble's constant, but it also showed that it was not a constant, and had a lower value in the early universe.  The expansion of the universe is accelerating, something that was utterly unpredicted.  So here is a piece of information that doesn't fit any accepted theories.  There is nowhere for it in the tangle of interconnected ideas I outlined in part one.  Now what?

Science is a process that is able to find it's own mistakes and shortcoming, and then generates within itself the improvements needed to over come its failings.  It is called the scientific method.

The scientific method, is to me, one of the most elegant processes that mankind has ever created.  It is certainly the most powerful process we have created.  But what is it?

This is the scientific method, and I shall disassemble it below.

First you need to have an idea, a hypothesis.  It doesn't matter if this is a flash of inspiration or a follow on from another well-established principle.  What is important is that it is testable.

A testable idea is one that makes predictions about the workings of nature which the idea encapsulates.  This means you can design and perform the quintessential element of science; the experiment.

Do the results of this experiment match the expected results as predicted by the idea?  No?  Then the idea is wrong and can be discarded.  Now you need a new idea, one that hopefully works better.

But what if the idea and the experiment do agree, well what you have there is a Theory.  Notice how it is not a theory until after there is experimental data to support it.  I want to emphasis this point.  One of my pet hates is the phrase 'just a theory'.  A theory is the highest possible rank of idea because it has been shown to be true.  Everything else is a guess, or a suggestion, or a wish.  A fact is not an idea; it's an observation. Saying a metre rule is a metre long is not a theory (metrologists, please take that sentence as it was intended).  Theorists continual produce new ideas, many of which can not be tested by existing technology, and they remain hypothetical, no mater how much sense they may make, if they can not be confirmed.

Now we have a theory, an explanation for a natural system, we can apply the theory to design more experiments and make predictions about more objects in nature that we don’t yet understand.  We can in a very real sense, explore the universe.

All these new tests and experiments will generate loads more data, and one of the rules about a theory is that it is supported by all the available evidence.  So all this new data has to be compared to the original theory to see if it is still in agreement.

If it is, then it feeds back on itself and we not only increase our knowledge but also increase the power and accuracy of our theory.  Our explanation of nature gets better. 

But what if the new data does not agree with the existing theory?  What happens if it is the Hubble telescope all over again?

Then there is a revolution.  The theory is wrong and must be discarded.  The old order is gone.  Years, possibly centuries of orthodoxy abandoned, and in its place a vacuum that new ideas can fill.  So we end up back at the beginning.  As theories are tested and found to be wrong, they are replaced by new theories that are less wrong.  Science has no end, only progress.

The diagram has described three circles.  Truly world leading research spends a lot of time going round circle one as they hunt for an idea with merit.  Day to day research builds on previous work and goes round circle two, increasing the depth of our knowledge, and once in a while a central principle is pulled down and we go round circle three.

At three billion Euros, the large hadron collider is the most expensive experiment yet built.  It was the very first experiment to test the Higg's field idea.  Yes, three billion Euros, and right at the top of the diagram.  And at such a huge cost you would expect the scientists to be glad it worked, but many would have been happier if it had not found the Higgs boson, because that would have meant the Standard Model of particle physics was wrong.  The Standard Model is one of the two pillar of physics, along with Relativity, proving it wrong would have meant new physics.  We already have inklings that the Standard Model is wrong but we lack data to decide how.  A machine as capable as the LHC, if it had not found what we expected, it would have found something genuinely interesting.  New data which would have fed back in to new ideas.  Less wrong ideas.

We don't invent science, we discover it.  The speed of light didn't change just because we measured it.  Animals evolved before we realised it.  Stars fused atoms for billions of years before we figured that out.  We still have a lot to learn and a lot of mistakes to make. 

There is the suggestion, especially amongst climate change deniers and creationists, that science protects its theories and can't admit they are wrong, as that would mean loss of funding and end careers. This is a ridiculous idea and comes from a basic misunderstanding of the scientific method.  Nothing in science in proven, or ever can be; it can only be disproven.  A thousand experiments may agree with your theory, but the thousand and first may render it void.  It also ignores the practical reality that a scientist who destroys a major theory gets a Noble prize, and their choice of professorship, and the researchers in that field are provided with decades of work as they must basically start all over again.

"General relativity has been destroyed?  Gentlemen, to the blackboard!"

At the other end of the ignorance scale are people who peddle nonsense with a science varnish applied.  Homeopathy and intelligence design have already been round circle one, and you only get to go once.  After that it’s the scrap heap.  Those ideas should be dead, but are kept alive by people who don’t understand the astonishing simplicity of the most powerful process we have.

Part 3 argues that this process of findin rules prevents religion from ever being correct.