Quantifying Doubt

Science as a Religion that Worships Doubt as its God

A rebuttal to the notion that science worships truth.

What science is all about, in contrast, is the quantification of doubt.

I’ve seen this from a sightly different angle. Some people like to say “For all we know, blah, blah, blah,” with the implication that some result or its opposite, or just a complete spectrum of outcomes, are equally likely. And it usually isn’t so — statements like that are from people trying to portray “not being sure” as being the same as “not having a clue.” What science does is limit the uncertainty involved in “for all we know,” and it does this by quantifying it. The answer may not be (for example) exactly 3, but knowing that 5 is right out adds to our knowledge. That’s something that a result of 3 ± 0.1 tells us.

Everything Old is Neutrino Again

So Close, yet So Far

[P]hotons are massless, whereas neutrinos have a tiny amount of mass, which makes them travel more slowly than light. In a question and answer session at a 2009 summer school, Mika Vesterinen, a graduate student in particle physics at the University of Manchester in England, asked Scott Dodelson, of the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois, how the mass of neutrinos would affect the distance the relic neutrinos had traveled since they last interacted. So Dodelson and Vesterinen set out to calculate the answer.

What they found surprised them: even though the relic neutrinos have been traveling for far longer than the CMB, their slower speed means they’ve covered much less distance. The cosmic neutrino background (CNB) originates from a distance of about a billion to ten billion light years away, much less than the 40-billion light-years for the CMB.

No Inoculation for Willful Ignorance

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.