Three pillars of science against fake news

the weather, the pandemic, the vaccines… The crises we are going through systematically generate their share of skeptics and alternative narratives. Often unfounded, these speeches unfortunately appeal to a large audience. They generally rely on the figure of the misunderstood genius, daring to defy academic well-thought, appeal to the “good sense” of their audience and to the aura of tribunes whose pride and certainties serve as arguments. That is to say the exact opposite of everything which has made science successful for several centuries … Let us resume in three points.

I. The collective, stronger than the solitary genius

It is a myth deeply rooted in the collective imagination: the great scientific advances are said to be the work of geniuses touched by grace, thinking against the grain of the certainties of their time. Thus, any charlatan or a little too egocentric researcher can he justify his isolation or the criticisms of his theories by comparing himself to Einstein or to Galileo. This is, alas, making many shortcuts.

First, modern science is still a collective affair. Albert Einstein himself, in the development of his theory of general relativity, benefited from the capital assistance of other scientists, in particular his friends Marcel Grossmann, brilliant mathematician, and the physicist Michele Besso, as this article in the magazine tells Nature. Today, transdisciplinarity and the ever more technological and complex instruments required for certain scientific advances tend to increase the number of researchers involved in major discoveries, as the magazine pointed out in June. Quebec Science. the sequencing from genome human, detection of new particles orgravitational waves are the subject of articles signed by hundreds or even thousands of scientists.

Above all, it is the consensus established by the scientific community that validates a theory. Until this consensus emerges, no researcher, however brilliant and renowned, can claim to have the truth. Should we take Einstein at his word? No, and fortunately because the physicist supported bitten what’universe was static and the quantum physics, which he had helped to found, could not be probabilistic. Experience proved that he had twice wrong.

This is why an essential step in the validation of scientific work consists in publishing it in a scientific journal with a reading committee, that is to say after proofreading, criticism, discussions with the authors, any corrections and validation by d other researchers in the field. This system has of course its limits and his failures. It constitutes a first filter but a study alone is never sufficient proof. An accumulation of other work should, over time, make it possible to reach conclusions and a consensus around them. ” A scientific truth can be recognized by its resistance flawlessly bombarded with tests, experiments, observations, arguments, counter-arguments, increasing multiplicity of data, to which a mixture of reality and colleagues subjects it », Summarizes the philosopher of science Etienne Klein in The taste of the real (Gallimard, Tract, 2020).

II. Beware of “common sense”

Another great lesson of science: our senses and our intuition deceive us. One can be refrigerated by a wave of cold on a warming planet, no offense to climate skeptics. Galileo, to use this tutelary figure of modern science, was one of those who learned to think against common sense: although he had been admitted since Aristotle that heavy objects fell faster than light objects – and that many people still think the same today – he argued that all objects “in a vacuum” should all fall at the same speed. More than 300 years after his death, astronaut David Scott demonstrated this, visible in this video, by dropping a feather and a hammer on the Moon.

We must therefore seek the scientific laws of nature ” hidden under the veil of appearances », To use the expression of the physicist Carlo Rovelli (The birth of scientific thought, Anaximandre de Milet, Dunod, 2020). The veil of appearances can also concern statistical data, very counter-intuitive for our brain. Randomly, about the pandemic of Covid-19… the services of fact checking mainstream media regularly alert to the risks of misinterpreting figures, for example establishing a fallacious causal link between vaccination and hospitalization Where vaccination and cardiac arrests.

This is particularly due to one of the many types of bias that plagues the human brain: illusory correlation bias. This mechanism, which has long been studied by psychologists, consists in establishing correlations between events that are in reality not or not very closely related. This satirical site shows, for example, a very convincing link between the number of deaths by drowning each year and the number of films with Nicolas Cage. It may make you smile, but replace Nicolas Cage with a vaccine and the temptation to jump to conclusions will be much stronger …

In general, a speaker who appeals to common sense, to simplistic explanations or to the emotion of his listeners must arouse suspicion in principle. He has little chance of expressing a scientific point of view.

III. Humility as a red thread

Paradoxically, ” the reliability of science is not based on certainty but on a radical lack of certainty », Writes Carlo Rovelli. This does not mean that all theories are equal or that we must relativize the value of scientific knowledge acquired over time … Simply that the scientific process must put the reality of experience and observation before dogmas.

It is even one of its principles, proposed by the famous philosopher of science Karl Popper: “refutability”. This means that a theory, to be “scientific”, must lead to a prediction that can be verified. If the prediction is wrong, then the theory is “disproved”. Some statements are not refutable: your horoscope, for example, is sufficiently vague in its predictions so that it can always be interpreted in such a way as to detect an element of truth. It is therefore not scientific, in the sense of Karl Popper.

This theoretical definition has its limits. The prediction can be false without this calling the theory into question, for example if it is the measuring instrument or the calculations that are faulty … But its principle underlines the inherent humility of the scientific process: science allows you to get as close as possible and rigorously to what the reality of the world would be, but there is no absolute truth. Galileo thought, for example, as Copernicus, that it was the Sun and not the Earth that was at the center of the universe. It was then discovered that the Sun itself was rotating around the center of our galaxy, and then the universe itself was expanding and had no center. The scientific description of reality thus adjusts over time, correcting and refining its theories.

But be careful, remember the first point: this lack of absolute certainty should not be a pretext to give credit to the first eccentric or alternative theorist to come. Through the test of time and the rigorous testing of the scientific community, scientific knowledge is becoming more and more solid. Barring some shattering and extremely improbable discoveries, the theory of evolution, the expansion of the universe or, more concretely, the human origin of global warming are solidly established scientific knowledge.

These are three pillars that have guided us for 20 years at Futura, and to which is added our fascination for the wonders of science and its discoveries. And today, we need you to continue exploring in paper format! So, are you coming?