I love "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia". It's probably my favorite show. And this is not only because they all have exactly my humor, but because they bring up so many fun, and interesting points. I just started thinking about what I am going to call "The Mac Defense", in which the character Mac talks about how "scientist are liars sometimes". His argument highlights a thought I have been thinking recently and is particularly on point to the scientific process, and is a critical aspect to good science communication. And that is the fact that scientist are wrong about a lot of things - but often not in the way that society perceives it - and poor science communication makes them look like liars.
Firstly, science is WRONG sometimes. When you are trying to push our fundamental understanding of nature forward, trying to understand something that we - the collective society 'we' - don't understand , you can't just sit around saying 'I don't know'. You gotta choose a direction, derive rigorous testable experiments, pass on the stuff you just can't make sense of and give the strongest conclusion possible with the data at hand. You're bound to make mistakes on the way. Rigorous experiments say what conclusions we can make and with what level of confidence, and this nuance is usually where the mistakes will be found.
For example, I was reading about the positron (related to part of my 'Clouds' project for everyday physics) and I read this passage on wikipedia:
"Dmitri Skobeltsyn first observed the positron in 1929 a Wilson cloud chamber...
Likewise, in 1929 Chung-Yao Chao, a graduate student at Caltech, noticed some anomalous results that indicated particles behaving like electrons, but with a positive charge, though the results were inconclusive and the phenomenon was not pursued...
Carl David Anderson discovered the positron on August 2, 1932,[13] for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936.
Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie in Paris had evidence of positrons in old photographs when Anderson's results came out, but they had dismissed them as protons."
I loved this passage because it so beautifully highlights how science really works. Chung-Yao Chao had a discovery in front of him that could have led to a Nobel prize, but didn't really understand what was going on there and explored some other stuff - then along comes Mr. Anderson and he picks up a Nobel. And not only that, the Curies had also discovered this particle - the first evidence for antimatter - and made a mistake and dismissed the events as something else. Something already known. When we push the horizons of knowledge, many mistakes will be made. (Oh, and of course a soviet Russian did it first. ). And to the second point: if science is poorly communicated, whether it be due to actively saying something slightly wrong or just saying nothing at all, it leads to a 'Mac Defense' that conflates scientific 'mistakes' with a lake of scientific 'rigor' and being a liar.
My most direct example of this is global warming. I often hear two sides get shouted in regards to global warming. One is "There is still debate in the scientific community about global warming" and "There is no debate. Global warming is real" and I feel like they're just shouting passed each other instead of actually talking. (Thanks to the media mostly.) Yes, there is still debate in the scientific community about Global Warming. It's science - people are always fucking debating about something. That's part of doing science. But this debate isn't about, so far as I understand it, global warming being real, but something more along the lines of "How much can the earth heat up before we're fucked". (But don't trust me, as Mac would say, the "Stupid Science Bitch", read something with sources!...and this is one of my projects now.)
I have a strong suspicion that this nuance in what the argument is actually about, is one thing that the media glosses over - if not completely ignores for the sake of viewership, causing confusion.
This is a random thought. I'm gonna go ahead and post it and get the details done latter