Theory vs. Fact: Getting Ugly Again
Posted on February 8, 2006
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Apparently there’s a big dust-up happening down at NASA over the resignation of George C. Deutsch, a conservative presidential appointee to NASA who tried to muzzle reports on climate change and forced NASA web developers to add “theory” after every instance of “Big Bang” on the site:
Mr. Deutsch’s resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.
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The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming.
The use of “Theory” as a means of tempering the impact of science is something the Right, particularly the Religious Right, has gotten quite good at doing these past few years: emphasis on the Theory of Evolution, the Theory of Global Warming, the Big Bang Theory, using “theory” as an invective to insinuate that whatever windmill of science they’re currently tilting at is really nothing but a half-baked idea tossed around by eggheads who can’t “prove” it. In other words: to them, theory = wrong.
The funny thing is: those half-baked eggheads tend to unanimously agree - it’s all theory. But that’s because the eggheads understand what “theory” means, the right… well, presumably some of them do too but it’s more useful to them as a weapon than as a scientific term.
I could try to explain but this comment from Slashdot by hey! says it all in explaining the relevance of “theory” in science:
Lord Macaulay in his 1841 speech to parliament on the issue of copyright extension had to deal with exactly this misunderstanding of what a “theory” is:
My honourable and learned friend talks very contemptuously of those who are led away by the theory that monopoly makes things dear. That monopoly makes things dear is certainly a theory, as all the great truths which have been established by the experience of all ages and nations, and which are taken for granted in all reasonings, may be said to be theories. It is a theory in the same sense in which it is a theory that day and night follow each other, that lead is heavier than water, that bread nourishes, that arsenic poisons, that alcohol intoxicates.
If I had to put the missing point in a nutshell, I’d do it this way: in science, not all theories are true, but all truths are theories. Of course it’s a bit of an overstatement, in that one can certainly talk about an individual fact in isolation. But as soon as you try to connect facts, you have a theory.
In otherwords: “Hey, it’s night-time!” is a fact. Eight hours later: “Hey, it’s daytime!” is also a fact. But “Daytime always follows night-time” is not a fact, it’s just a theory. Why? Because it is unprovable with 100% certainty. Because there is the possibility, even a very high probability, that at some point in the future daytime will not follow night-time. It might remain night-time forever (which is also just a theory).
Really, all “theory” is is any scientifically-derived, fact-based explanation that has not, or cannot, be proven to be immutable with 100% certainty. Nothing more, nothing less.
(Given that definition of “theory” it is left up to the reader to discern why the “theory of intelligent design” is in fact not a scientific theory at all but rather just a simple hypothesis.)
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