Question: Should you trust what “the science” says about vaccines, the big bang, or anything? Well, I think, yes. Scientists assume that the physical universe has knowable properties and laws. They know that sometimes old ideas need to be updated. What science asserts is the best explanation for what we currently know. New facts will sometimes mean we have to reevaluate previous findings. “The slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact”, T.H. Huxley, 1870
One example. In 1928 Paul Dirac postulated anti-matter as an explanation for an odd behavior seen in electrons. He thought his idea was weird and warned his colleagues that the proposed hypothesis might be crazy. (Anti-matter is “stuff” with all the properties of normal matter except that positive and negative charges are reversed in anti-matter. When anti-matter touches normal matter, both the matter and anti-matter disappear, and just energy remains!) In 1932 Carl Anderson detected anti-matter. It really did exist. For 90 years theorists and experimenters have been groping to learn more about anti-matter. A question arose about gravity and anti-matter. Would anti-matter to fall down or fall upward? It took almost a century before being able to test this. Now we know. Anti-matter falls down, just like normal matter. Trust, but verify!
But who cares? Will this new bit of knowledge be important? We can’t know just yet. In science, the quest for the importance of a new idea can go for decades before we know if it’s significant or not. Seemingly unrelated data and observations can accumulate for years until someone looks at all the findings and notices a pattern that makes a lot of facts fit together. Suddenly, odd old observations make sense. (Dirac got a Nobel Prize for his “crazy” idea.) Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” calls this process a paradigm shift.
Some examples are Newton’s Law of Gravity in 1687 and Mendeleev’s revolution of Chemistry with his Periodic Table in 1869 (also a Nobel Prize). These were revolutionary shifts for science knowledge. There are many less historic, but still important shifts in the progress of our view of the physical world. Science is a gradual and sometimes sudden push back on human ignorance.
This brings us around to the science of Astronomy. To make a paradigm shift in astronomy is really hard. The objects to be studied, the stars, are so distant. In 1835, Auguste Comte, a prominent French philosopher stated that humans would never be able to understand the chemical composition of stars There was skepticism about progress in astronomy. Comte was soon proved wrong. By the latter half of the 19th century, astronomers borrowed a new technique from chemistry and physics: spectroscopy. This caused a paradigm shift in astronomy. By analyzing the trickle of light from distant stars you can reveal a star’s composition, but not just composition. A star’s light reveals more. Starlight encodes clues to stellar properties such as their temperature, size, rotation rate, mass, distance, and even a star’s life cycle. So, unless a new paradigm shift occurs before next week, spectroscopy will be our topic for next time.
Inquiries: James Hill, Mississippi NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, jhill6333@gmail.com
