The Science is Settled

There are many meanings to the term settled. Which is meant when people claim, "the science is settled"? In aquatic climes, detritus settles down to rot and be raked over by bottom-feeders. The resemblance to modern science is indeed profound. Perhaps they mean in the same sense as settling a bill. When the NSF check clears the bank, the science is settled. Or perhaps the allusion is akin to a stomach settling, in between bouts of diarrhea. Those are all appropriate metaphors, but they don't quite capture the intended meaning. There are probably two usages that best fit. One is what we might hear after a heated argument that doesn't end in a mutual agreement. The parent or teacher tells the child that the matter is settled and she doesn't want to hear another word about it. Another might a visual of dust settling after a battle. How do we decide which side won? Well that's never a problem. Whoever freely roams the battlefield, plundering the wares of the fallen, is clearly the winner. Which scientists won the debate? Whichever ones are free to roam the campus, cash the NSF checks, and publish in the most prestigious and politically-correct (same thing) journals.

Of course, we aren't inherently opposed to having decisions default to the authority figure, or nations deciding the only remaining option is longswords. Hierarchy has its costs. It depends on the particulars. Is the teacher an educator or a tyrant? Is she competent at her duties, or is she actually making her students dumber? Science, on the other hand, is supposed to progress towards truth in spite of - or ideally in absence of - authoritarianism. Science is an ideal. It's an institution of people, and depends on those people to be open, honest, and to have the integrity to put their noble pursuit of knowledge in front of personal and professional benefit. The scientific capacity of a nation is limited by the character of its people.

When they say the science is settled, they mean that the process of science has been faithfully executed to its fullest ideal, therefore there is no possibility that skepticism is valid. Because today's scientific environment is not ideal - in fact is riddled with outright fraud and absurdity - the implied message is more like: go away dirt people. The cloud people are insulted by your existence.

Now we all know that this is usually all in the context of climate change, the most politicized of academic disciplines. We've done that topic a number of times here, so no need to rehash it too much, but the major points are that the funding comes with a preference of outcome, that all the errors (and outright scandals) occur in favor of that outcome, and - more importantly than anything else - the settled science never actually predicts anything. We can't help but make the analogy to doomsday cults, who's members double down in their beliefs after the apocalypse (again) fails to materialize. The entirety of the settled science regarding climate change can be reduced to a single equation: doomsday = x + 15, where x is there current year.

We normally blame the outright fraud that is "climate science" - rule of thumb: no field of study with the word "science" in its name is really a science - on liberal politics. Unfortunately, other fare little better. The reproducibility crisis affects most disciplines, particularly the social sciences. Cancer research is an utter racket. Charities take huge overheads in the name of "raising awareness," as if there is anyone who still has not heard of cancer. The researchers are just as deceiving, always assuring the breakthrough is right around the corner. [cure = x + 15] One trick for funding is to boast to the funding committees that your new compound has been preliminarily shown to kill cancer in 100% of trials, without mentioning that it belongs to a family of compounds known to kill the host as well. (For a million dollars I can cure your cancer with a single 9mm round.) Once the funding is obtained, the other task is to loot it. One trick is to provide housing for your grad students in some dingy apartment in the campus area, and bill the grant funds at a highly inflated rate.

Most painfully, physics is not immune to the crisis. It's sad to see the field of astrophysics so compromised. The deep reaches of space are out of bounds from our petty, terrestrial political squabbles, and even so the academic community fails profoundly. As a discipline, they are constantly backpedaling. With each new probe sent to some new corner of the heliosphere, their predictions are refuted, oftentimes dramatically. Venus should not have been hot, Saturn's north pole very cold. A comet crashing into Jupiter was supposed be anti-climactic, not explode in an enormous fireball. In moments of clarity, they say they must reconsider their most basic assumptions, even rewrite the known laws of physics. Those things never actually happen. They patchwork ever more complexity onto their models, and request funding for the next experiment that will surely prove their claims.

No better example exists than dark matter. Astronomers noted that the rotational velocities of stars around galaxies do not slow with distance, as in planets do about our sun. (Mercury scoots along nearly tens times as fast as Neptune, and completes nearly 700 orbits to each of Neptune's.) This was in addition to other observations that galaxies and larger structures did not seem to hold enough mass to remain gravitationally composed. The models did not match the observations. The solution? Throw out the observations! Or, more accurately, augment them with some hypothetical observations. They invented the necessary mass to make the equations work; 5.7 times as much as the visible stuff, roughly. It sounds like looney tunes, but it is plausible. It's not been disproven, at least. But, it is surely an exotic hypothesis and should be considered as such. Scientists have only piled on, adding dark energy, dark inertia...whatever is needed. Like the other branches, a simple equation sums it all up: 5 + 5 = 2 + dark_numbers. I do suspect that, as our scientific probes and devices improve, those of us with 20-30 years left will see many of the currently unquestioned aspects of the current model thrown out. At the front of the line is dark matter & dark energy. They're just too ridiculous, too convenient, and too ugly (mathematically) to be likely.

Another candidate is neutron stars. Astrophysicists had to account for quickly flickering stars. Because only rotation can cause periodic motion in their worldview, they had to devise stars that were both extremely small (to rotate quickly) and extremely massive (to stay composed under extraordinary centrifugal force). They devised the neutron star, so dense that normal matter breaks down into a soup of subatomic particles. And they have to be neutrons, otherwise the star would be quickly destroyed. So the neutron soup spins rapidly with the equator at relativistic speeds, and the light emitted from near the poles is pulsated as consequence of a hypothesized extreme magnetic field in a process I can't pretend to understand. Also in the category of things I can't comprehend: how a spinning neutrally charged object creates a magnetic field orders of magnitude strong than any other object in the known universe. To my credit, they don't seem to even attempt an explanation. Pulsars, like dark matter, are a highly exotic theory. And, unlike dark matter, perhaps not even possible, as emitted energy exceeds theoretical limits for a radiating body of that size, and neutrons in isolation quickly decay into a proton-electron pair.

Alt science people proposes their own exotic theories. Some people are convinced the Earth is hollow. It sounds ridiculous. But realize, the neutron star is vastly more improbable than a hollow Earth. Frankly, neutron stars make a hollow Earth seem pedestrian, almost trivial. They are even more likely to be discredited than dark matter. Interestingly, they are one of the main examples given to substantiate Einstein's theory of general relativity. Discrediting neutron stars won't disprove general relativity, but will certainly reduce its body of evidence.

Many billions of dollars are spent testing the theories. Most experiments fail, and often result are contradictory to theory. There are a few standout successes that are used to tote the supremacy of modern physics. And yet, they sometimes seem something like red herrings to distract from the otherwise constant flow of disappointment. One was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which was predicted as a result of the Big Bang. Although, if you read up you'll have to endure answers like this one, which boasts that the measured radiation perfectly matches predictions, or that the temperature variations fit theoretical predictions. Not so true, they fit post hoc. They were not, in fact, predicted, and the models had to be updated to make the proper "prediction."

Besides all that, they've had a couple big wins in the last few years. The Higgs boson was discovered at CERN, at a cost of some $15 billion (plus whatever was spent at other sites like FermiLab in Illinois) which provided solid support for the standard model of particle physics. A second one was the detection of gravity waves at LIGO, coincident with a gamma-ray event, reported as a black-hole merger, which confirmed Einstein's prediction that the speed of gravity equals the speed of light. While not proof of spacetime, it was confirmation of the final unconfirmed prediction of general relativity. It is the standing theory of gravity, and competing theories will face a strong threshold for credibility, notwithstanding some supporting evidence for general relativity collapses, such as the neutron star.

Particle physics seems to have faired better than astrophysics as of late. Yet, even with major advances underpinning the standard model and general relativity, who would ever say the science is settled in those domains? There is certainly room for a different explanation of gravity, at least, and it's not clear if the current theory would ever be proved beyond any doubt. Saying the "science is settled" should get one about the same reaction in academia as you'd get swearing loudly in Church. And in particular, when used to describe fields in which the dominating theories routinely fail.