THEORETICALLY SPEAKING

Good data is a good place to start, but the practice of science is about more than gathering data.  As a scientist I am always asking myself – and those I work with – what is the data telling us?  Can we paint a mental picture of what we are studying that will help us in our ongoing work.  Scientific experimentation in every field of study is a work in progress, there is always more to learn.  With a good mental picture that fits the data we have in hand, a theory, we can go about our work more effectively.  We assemble data, formulate a theory, and then test the theory with more experimentation.  Theories are not reality, they are mental constructs that approximate reality based on the data we have in hand.  We use them as long as they fit the data, then modify them, or throw them out entirely and formulate a new theory that more accurately accounts for what we are learning.

Up to about 500 years ago people thought that the sun and the stars revolved around the earth.  At the time this was a good and useful theory – it served mankind well for thousands of years.  Then, in 1514 Copernicus put forth the heliocentric theory.  His revolutionary theory (excuse the pun) was that the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth.  The sun did not revolve around the earth, but the earth revolved around the sun.  New data that he collected about the movements of the planets and the stars simply did not fit existing theory, so he formulated a new theory.  Over the last 500 years the heliocentric theory has been refined and changed as new and better data became available.  It was discovered that the sun is not the center of the universe.  It is just one of millions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and there are millions of galaxies.  Just recently new data has proven that planets form solar systems around stars besides our sun.  Astronomers expected to find them.  This data fits our mental construct of what we think the universe looks like. We now have solid data proving that other solar systems do exist.  Astronomers, however, did not expect to find water – ice that is – on Mercury.  Sketchy data a few years back indicated that it might be there, but good data now proves that significant quantities of ice are packed in craters shaded from the sun’s heat.  Wow!  That scorched little planet so close to the sun has water – time to rethink our theories about the formation of the solar system.

I love the process of science.  I love gathering data, and I really love data that challenges our theories and forces us to think differently.  Most scientists feel the same way.  So, watch out, your pet theory that seems so iron clad today may be severely amended or even tossed out tomorrow.