Following the science

Aged eleven, in the first physics lesson at our grammar school, we were given an introduction to the scientific method. There were about thirty of us in the form, and we were each issued with a yardstick. At one side of the room lay a heap of cardboard boxes of many different sizes; we were told to calculate the volume of each and draw a histogram to show the distribution of volumes so calculated.

It was a fairly normal distribution as I recall, pretty well bell-shaped. Some of the boys went to immense pains to make their histograms look nice. One of them was singled out by the master and his graph held up for us all to admire.

Then, with due theatricality, the master slowly tore the paper in two, and then into four, before crumpling it and throwing it over his shoulder.

To his shocked pupils he said, ‘However pretty your results might be, they are intrinsically worthless because you assumed that the yardsticks I gave out are accurate. Before undertaking any scientific inquiry whatsoever, you must, above all, question everything about what you are proposing to do. You must eliminate personal bias, as far as you can; you must be sceptical; and you must be prepared to discard your results if you realise later that you have made an unwarranted assumption.’

Nine years later, as part of my undergraduate studies, I was enrolled in a course called The Philosophy of Science. Here we studied the work of such men as Nagel and Kuhn and learned of the gradual evolution of scientific inquiry from ancient to modern times. We learned that science is not a fixed body of knowledge but a process consisting, today, of assertions backed by experimentation and a constant attack on those assertions until a ‘fact’ emerges, which fact can and should yet be questioned if further experimentation casts doubt on its validity.

To give a very simple example: I hypothesise that if I drop a stone from my hand it will always fall to the ground. To test this, I drop 100 stones and each of them behaves as expected. I publish the results of my experiment and assert, as a fact, that if you drop a stone it will always fall to the ground.

Other scientists will then repeat the experiment; but if even one of the stones so dropped does something other than fall to the ground, my ‘fact’ will be questioned. 

Thus anyone who uses the phrase ‘the science’, as in ‘we are following the science’, is either ignorant or deliberately trying to mislead. And anyone who attempts to censor a scientist who questions the prevailing orthodoxy cannot be a scientist himself and is moreover, when the science involved concerns medicine, a menace to humanity.