The Truth Is Out There

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

The Truth Is Out There

By Josh Lake, Science Department Chair

When 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, 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. In his time, he was mocked by the scientific community, rightly called an outsider to the field, dismissed without time to speak during scientific conferences, and considered the butt of easy jokes among the top scientists in the field. Politics got mixed into the science arguments, as he was a German in the early 1900s and American and British scientists were the reigning scientific authorities. He died in the harsh snows of Greenland attempting to find more evidence of his simple idea: coastlines fit together because the continents have moved over time. Yes, the one who correctly saw what we all now so easily believe in never lived to see his correct ideas about plate tectonics become the accepted worldview. It’s so uncontroversial to us now because modern scientists know what’s happening on the seafloor and can measure seismic shifts in real time.

Last summer, I had an alien encounter. No, it wasn’t the meeting from a sci-fi movie that I hoped for as a teen; it was a giant, alien-faced hot air balloon landing on campus as I walked my dog. I later reached out to the company, CT Voyager Balloons, and found that they were looking for someone to help with setup, chasing, and packing the balloon. Several days later, I was aloft over campus, acting as ballast as skydivers jumped out of the basket while I filmed them! Over the summer, I learned so much more about weather, thermodynamics, balancing forces, and engineering than I ever could have by reading textbooks or watching videos. The safety of our crew and passengers required constant measuring, double checking, and a deep understanding of the principles in action… and even still, every flight was an adventure. Our pilot, with over a decade of experience, constantly told our crew that new things happened on every single flight and he was in a permanent mode of learning new things — a student of the skies and winds.

The pursuit of truth through science has opened our eyes, brought us farther and faster than we could have imagined, and we now have so much power to make people’s lives better through the applications of science. More than ever, we need to put the prefix Con in front of Science to develop our conscience, a humble acknowledgement that we do not have it all figured out, that reality is less certain than our assertions imply, that it is always worth asking how we know what we think we know. That is critical thinking, one of the core skills we strive to teach at Pomfret, and I urge my students to bring a spirit of curiosity and healthy skepticism to all of their classes. Science is not the only thing, as my colleagues in the arts, humanities, and pure mathematics correctly tell us, but science is indeed a noble endeavor, one that we should strive to improve, protect, and practice honestly.