Getting things wrong

Comet ISON stumbles on after its closest encounter with the Sun (public domain, NASA, from Wikipedia).

As this is written, we are waiting to see if Comet ISON will come out from behind the sun. Two nights ago on our national news, the comet was declared dead and disintegrated, based on images taken from satellites orbiting at appropriate angles as it made its closest pass to the sun. The comet disappeared. Then a few hours later, like the dead man in Monty Python's Holy Grail who announces he'd like to go for a walk, the comet popped out of the solar glare, dimmer but at least somewhat intact. It was fascinating to watch the scientific press in the months leading up to this event.  Pessimists were adamant that the comet was doomed, while optimists anticipated the Comet of the Century. 

Is it surprising that people are confused when scientists disagree? It doesn't bother scientists much, because we live in a culture of controversy, criticism and differing interpretations of the same data. This is lost when our musings are translated for retransmittal by the media. Uncertainty, chaos and risk are elements of modern science, but much of modern society, including many science journalists and their readers, seems stuck in a binary world of plus or minus, black or white, right or wrong.

A few months ago, I read a book by Matthew Cobb called Generation, and was struck by a paragraph that accused scientists of only telling stories of success and omitting the false turns and dead ends they encounter in the pursuit of the truth. This leads to the impression that science is invariably a triumphant progression from one discovery to the next. Generation is the story of how science figured out where babies came from. It is an alternately horrifying and hilarious read, centred around two 17th century Dutch scientists, Reinier de Graaf and Jan Swammerdam. They were best buddies as students in Leiden, but became terrible enemies as they competed to work out what contribution ladies made to procreation, what Fallopian tubes and ovaries were for, and what those newly discovered squiggly sperm cells made by male mammals were about. Some scientists of the time suspected ladies might make eggs, but they imagined eggs like those of chickens, and they couldn't find anything like that in there. The vicious rivalry between de Graaf and Swammerdam shows us that 'scientists behaving badly' is not just a modern phenomenon. Both men made huge contributions, both made lots of mistakes, and they never missed an opportunity to try to squash each other.

There are many books intended for the general audience built around mistakes made by famous scientists. They tend not to illuminate the scientific process, but rather mock 'so-called geniuses' for making 'bone-headed mistakes.' John Glassie's book, A Man of Misconceptions, is a biography of the seventeenth century German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher, a polyglot and polymath who lived most of his life in Rome. He wrote huge volumes of natural philosophy before the scientific method was widely understood. Among his many interests was the mathematics of music, and he is often associated with the notorious cat piano (in German katzenklavier), a keyboard that pricked tails of restrained cats who were selected to howl in pitch. Kircher was controversial even in his own time because of his wild claims about magnetism (his explanation for most phenomena), his dubious translations of hieroglyphics on Egyptian obelisks, and his monographs on China, produced without the tedious necessity of actually travelling there. My favourite Kircher creation is his theory of everything, which states that there are 371,993,326,789,901,217,467,999,148,150,835,200,000,000 possible concepts. He derived this number from a formula involving the nine essential attributes of God, i.e. goodness, magnitude, duration, strength, wisdom, will, power, truth and glory; the nine universal subjects, namely God, angels, heaven, elements, man, animals, vegetables, minerals and numbers; and nine principles of relationship, being difference, agreement, opposition, beginning, middle, end, majority, equality and minority. He did this without an electronic calculator or computer, of course; it must have taken awhile. The book is predictably ironic and mocking, but not as funny as one might expect. The best joke is a cover blurb characterizing Kircher as a cross between Leonardo da Vinci and Mr. Bean. The book needed less da Vinci and more Mr. Bean.

Just as in life, making mistakes in science is an important part of getting things right. We usually don't go around bragging about our failures in life, and scientists usually don't dwell on failed experiments or half-baked ideas. Is this dishonest? Is this concealment? I don't think so. We tell our children about some of our false steps along the path of life, hoping to protect them from some pain, and scientists tell their students about the flasks that exploded, acids accidentally spilled, or experimental controls that were poorly conceived. We just don't talk to reporters about it.

The media don't consider that making mistakes in science is part of the routine. It is far more exciting to cast innuendos about competence, deception, or (hold on to your hat) fraud. In such an environment, throwing Italian geologists in jail for failing to predict earthquakes actually makes sense. But revised understanding is rarely a correction of fraud, incompetence or stupidity. It is usually compensation for incompleteness, sometimes because of laziness, but more often, limits imposed by existing technology. Each generation exceeds the achievements of the previous, not because of superior intellect, but because of refined technology. My most esteemed colleagues did not get everything right; some major breakthroughs were mostly wrong. But these inspired, energetic leaps brought us much closer to the truth, and emphasizing that they missed the target by a few percent misses the point. The story, as always, is ingenuity, insight and creativity. We get things right by first getting things wrong, just less wrong with each step.

PS. Sadly, regarding Comet ISON, the pessimists prevail and most of us will not have a chance to see its ghost in our evening skies this December. Unless, of course, we have access to some highly refined, modern technology.