When Observation and Reality Don't Match

Science has given us many many things. If science was on Facebook, I'd 'like' it, as we have received so much from it over the centuries. Modern science - since say 1500 - has enabled us as a species to take leaps and bounds forward - I won't bore you with an infomercial as I don't think there would be much disagreement over this point. (note I'm not deriding any other form of contribution here, just singling out Science for recognition).

One of my very favorite contributions that scientists have made (after-all it's people doing science that counts) is in theoretical areas where they are trying to establish something as fact. When looked at this way, science comes to the border lands with philosophy with a "I think therefore I am" approach credited to Rene Descartes, arguably the father of modern philosophical thought and a noted physicist and scientist too, who lived until 1650. You see back in those early years of modern science, there was so much to discover, uncover and prove still, that where science began, and philosophy ended was still murky. One of the first tasks of modern scientific thought was to establish a set of rules or laws for how it would work that would stand the test of time. Descartes wasn't alone in doing this, his contemporaries like Galileo and shortly afterward Newton worked to establish similar sets of rules we could lay our scientific foundation on.

One of the best outputs of these various efforts in my opinion was a generic rule was that a theory had to be established as sound, and then proven, before it could be accepted as a scientific 'law'. So powerful is this idea, that it translated well into Biology, Chemistry , Physics and modern life. Just because I say something that feasibly makes sense, doesn't make it real, unless observation and experimentation can prove it to be real. For example, when I was a little kid, I thought I'd figured out the whole human body thing. You see I knew that when your heart stopped, you died. I knew the heart and lungs were related in some way too. So, I hypothesized that when you held your breath, your heart stopped, and then you died. It explained asphyxiation and why your body took over in an involuntary spasm when it really needed air (the body wanted the heart to go again) This is an example then of a theory that could have been easily dis-proven by checking your heart rate when holding your breath - only I was 6 and unaware of this scientific principle, so didn't do that. But I digress.

The value of this simple, elegant law is tremendous, and sometimes it's shocking that it's forgotten.

When we witness something that should make us question the law or established 'fact', we often choose instead to disbelieve what we have witnessed. While granted we can be fooled or mistaken by what we see at times, when strong empirical evidence is presented to us that contradicts something we had previously taken as "truth or fact" often the reaction will be to maintain our view, when it is clearly wrong.

I'll keep my eyes open for this in the coming days - and I bet I can come back with some meaty examples pretty quick.