FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
The Truth Is Out There By Josh Lake, Science Department Chair
W
hen I was the age of my students, I passionately believed in aliens. I was an astronomy nerd, constantly looking at the night sky, desperately hoping to see a UFO or have a peaceful alien encounter. I watched The X-Files; I knew that The Truth Is Out There! Yet during my nearly twenty years of teaching at Pomfret, my personal pendulum has swung the other way. My students frequently ask about my own views on extraterrestrial life, and we spend nearly a week studying astrobiology and considering the options each spring in my Cosmology elective. While I’m very familiar with the classic arguments — with billions of stars in our galaxy alone, most with planets circling them, how can there not be other life out there? — my view has cooled to “I’m open to it… let’s wait and see… I’m skeptical.” Such is Science, or should be. “Science” has been personified in these Covid-times, as we’ve all heard (or said) statements like “Trust the Science,” “Science says…,” and “The Science is settled.” In my role as chair of the Science Department, I feel the need to defend our methods and practices from such monolithic blanket statements. Indeed, it’s very dangerous to turn scientific conclusions of any stripe into a belief system or pronouncements of faith. “Science” doesn’t need to be believed or trusted because if it is legitimate,
26
POMFRET WINTER 2022
it can be verified, tested, and stand on its own — a collection of naked truths about the way things are. Scientific conclusions can and should inform our beliefs and ideas, but we should always take what we learn from scientific studies with a grain or spoonful of NaCl, lest we repeat frequent missteps of the past. The history of science is a history of failure, one after another, and that’s a good thing. It’s not failing and giving up, it’s failing forward, replacing old understandings with new ones that better reflect reality. The mighty Isaac Newton, father of the field of physics and coinventor of calculus, had his incredible body of work corrected by future scientists, notably Albert Einstein, upon further discoveries. But Einstein, in turn, was wrong about universal expansion, quantum physics, and the Big Bang. Thanks to new discoveries by scientists since his time, students in my classes know more about galaxies than Einstein did. Fred Hoyle, the authoritative astronomer who sarcastically coined the term “Big Bang” because of his beliefs, went to his death bed believing the universe was static and eternal because he had closed his mind to new evidence. You probably don’t know the name of German scientist Alfred Wegener, but you certainly know of his theory; you were likely taught about it in elementary school as a scientific truth.
