Ask Slashdot: Why Are Scientists Constantly Surprised By What They Discover? 254
Slashdot reader dryriver asks about "the sheer number of times scientists consider something to be 'scientifically impossible', are badly disproven by some kind of new finding or discovery a few years later, and then express 'surprise' that 'X is indeed possible'."
If you do a Google News search for the keywords "scientists were surprised" or similar, a huge number of science-related news articles contains a passage about "scientists being surprised" by what they discovered. There seems to be a great disparity between the mindset of inventors -- who always try to MAKE new things become possible -- and the mindset of many scientists, who seem unable or unwilling to consider that what "science holds to be true today" may not turn out to be quite so true tomorrow.
Here's the question: Why do many scientists, having knowledge of the fact that surprises in science happen all the time, continually express "surprise" when they find something unusual? If surprises in scientific research are so common, why are scientists still "surprised" by "surprise findings"?
"The surprising stuff is what we hear about, and there has to be some reason why it is surprising," argues gurps_npc in response to the original submission. "A common answer is that current state of science thinks the surprising stuff was impossible."
"The whole premise is flawed," counters long-time reader Martin+S. "Natural skepticism is an essential component of science." And long-time reader UnknownSoldier supplies a one-word answer: "Ego."
But how would you answer the question? Share your best thoughts in the comments. Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
Here's the question: Why do many scientists, having knowledge of the fact that surprises in science happen all the time, continually express "surprise" when they find something unusual? If surprises in scientific research are so common, why are scientists still "surprised" by "surprise findings"?
"The surprising stuff is what we hear about, and there has to be some reason why it is surprising," argues gurps_npc in response to the original submission. "A common answer is that current state of science thinks the surprising stuff was impossible."
"The whole premise is flawed," counters long-time reader Martin+S. "Natural skepticism is an essential component of science." And long-time reader UnknownSoldier supplies a one-word answer: "Ego."
But how would you answer the question? Share your best thoughts in the comments. Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
It's a trick to get your papers published (Score:5, Insightful)
In many scientific fields, especially mathematics (which is of course not technically a science but that's not the point here so let's not argue about that), results are often not interesting unless they are "surprising". Hence the tendency to exxegerate things.
There are also the occasions when scientists are pessimistic about certain results, and when these turned out well, they become pleasantly surprised.
So are scientists lying when they say they are surprised? No, they are indeed surprised. However, the level of surprise is low. It's a figure of speech.
For us to be alarmed, we would have to be "shocked" and "in disbelief".
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I wonder if what you say accounts for all cases. To me there are two main types of scientists, which of course may overlap. There are the theoreticians, and the experimentalists. I’ll stick to historical figures only because their examples are most well-known.
Let’s take Copernicus as an example of the first. He did not discover anything, but was certain that his explanation of the revolution of the heavenly orbs was correct. So his surprise, if he had any, would be that people could possibly ho
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Well, in the case of Copernicus he was so "surprised" at the resistance to his results that he arranged to have the published after he was safely dead.
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Formal publication is not the only viable straw poll.
Nothing stiffens your posthumous resolve like a bracing cold shoulder from the progressive, insider sect in response to your tentative feelers.
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How many papers have you published?
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In an addendum to that, if scientists never tested stuff they didn't already know the answer, there would be no surprises. This doesn't quite get to the point however. In doing science, we work from existing theories most of the time. If the theories were complete, there would be no surprises. We know they aren't complete, but they do indicate somethings should be so. Scientists are looking at the things that should be so. They are pleasantly surprised if it turns out not to be so, but at a mild level of su
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Occasionally there are big surprises. The speed of light being a constant is one example. Unexpected, first reaction is the measuring device is wrong, leading to remeasuring and even more accurate instruments to measure. Then acceptance and the need to have new theories.
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> It's a trick to get your papers published
"We were surprised" is usually not in the scientific paper, rather it is in the article that (other) media write about the paper. So it is a trick by media to get you to read the article.
And here an AC speaks the real reason. Media presents any science finding as if Scientists making the discovery are walking around in a state of shock, rattled to the core, perhaps needing some recreational drugs to unwind from the terrible surprise.
When in fact, a scientist finding something new tends to say "Well that's surprising. Cool. Now I have more questions."
In other words, more like finding a 20 in your pants pocket than surprising like a Hail Mary Pass completion on the final play of a foo
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Nice metaphors, though I was surprised you didn't complete the passing play already in motion: that an AC on slashdot was heard to speak the real reason.
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I was surprised you didn't complete the passing play already in motion: that an AC on slashdot was heard to speak the real reason.
Good point.
That's easy. (Score:2)
Being thorough on a subject makes you preoccupied. Especially if you're smart that way. Being thorough on the scientific method makes you discover things and are truly proven to be new. Which makes details you had the wrong assumptions about ever more surprising.
Also: calling a discovery surprising makes a report about it more interesting.
Journalists and headline editors, not scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
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For further details on bad journalism, read http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
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While that's true, there's a difference between the science community and individual scientists. As humans we tend to get stuck in our ways, you can tell how many great changes are not truly over until that generation is dead and buried. If you're an expert it's even harder to get over the fact that your expertise is wrong, we have our known unknowns but many things we think we've figured out completely. So while journalists obviously pick the juiciest headlines, I'm not surprised there are scientists that
ideas with no metabolism (Score:2)
This, too, is largely a myth that should be carefully examined.
Suppose string theory hadn't been a crock for working physicists (as opposed to chalk artists). What would Richard Feynman have done next?
First of all, mathematics is notoriously a young man's game (as far ahead of her times as Ada Lovelace managed to be, she was no Srinivasa Ramanujan).
I've been trying to m
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Also there is a tendency of journalism to report on the surprise of the general public when the scientists had an expectation of the event. For example, the Higgs boson particle was found by CERN but it was predicted more than 50 years ago.
And Scientists are surprised, shocked, and baffled that it took so long.
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...and what they did next will amaze you!
Its all the fault of a housewife in Pennsylvania, who has the insurance companies running scared.
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The true story is "Scientists explained an interesting phenomenon in greater detail than before. They seemed excited about this. However, I failed to grasp the essence of what was important about it".
Clarke's First Law (Score:5, Interesting)
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke's first law
Yeah well I want to see EXAMPLE of that (Score:3)
They are pretty damn rare, and often taken out of context (like the quote about airplane not being possible - it was about directed flight within the known engineering - dumb but not as dumb as saying flight in general was impossible - just look at birds). I have not seen many of them , usually it is down to claim not being shored up by evidence, but when that DO happens much later to have evidence, then
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(Fiction is a wonderful thing - but probably not science).
Re:Remember: Clarke's First Law is fiction (Score:5, Informative)
According to Shirlock Holmes "when you have eliminated the possible, only the impossible remains!"
I do not know who Shirlock Holmes is, but the actual Sherlock Holmes quote is: "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"
So... exactly the opposite of what you said.
If you really care to know... (Score:5, Informative)
As a neuroscientist I can tell you why many scientists in the life sciences are surprised by findings: shocker! It's because living systems are so absurdly complicated. Just take a look at what is known currently for any major biochemical pathway, or gene regulation, or mitochondrial metabolism, or protein trafficking in the cell. The complexity is mind boggling. Anyone who thinks you can wade into that abyss of unknowns with certainty hasn't done any biological research.
That's what we call selection bias. (Score:5, Insightful)
Things going according to plan don't make for exciting news. Discoveries that were planned for don't make for exciting news. Only the unexpected gets attention. If you find something you were expecting anyway, then there is nothing to be excited about.
You could even cite Claude Shannon: Information is the inverse of probability. If the Improbable happens, you get much more information than from an event highly probable. Thus yes, important discoveries are often not expected.
Why tell anyone you are not surprised? (Score:2)
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What is exciting is when they see something that does not behave they way they expect. When they are SURPRISED by the result of the experiment there is something new to discover!
This is true. I think that the fundamental divide between scientists and the rest of the world is that the "normal person" reads how "Scienitists are Surprised By..! stories thinks that the scientists are upset. This is because so many "normal people" demand surety in their lives. Religion, some of the weirder economic theories, politics. Those things are difficult to change because even when obviously wrong, they don't want that surprise.
Scientists on the other hand, love surprises. The individual scient
Obvious Answer (Score:2)
But how would you answer the question? Share your best thoughts in the comments. Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
Why would you care what we think? If you were a scientist you'd run a goddamn experiment and find the actual answer.
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Language and statistics (Score:2)
Because you're comparing a tiny percentage of apocryphal, paraphrased quotes using loose fluffy editorial subjective language to describe an objective process
Was this originally posted in the 'random dumb questions people ask at parties' topic ?
It's amazing they aren't constantly surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to primates that evolved for life on the savannahs of Africa.
It's rather amazing that natural laws are amenable to logic, mathematics, and thought experiments, and that scientists so often guess right.
In other words, this is the wrong question. The question should be "Why is the natural world predictable in such detail, and why are we getting it right more often than not?"
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That red shadow light (which is earthglow) is always there, it's just usually way below the level of illumination provided by the sun.
Different meaning (Score:5, Interesting)
Scientists aren't surprised. That's just the language that is used to describe findings that don't match up with existing dogma.
As another poster suggested, the natural world is exceedingly complex. Physics aside, our models of it tend to be simple. Simple models perforce do not capture complexity, and thus, are often wrong when you test them beyond their domain.
If you, as a scientist, aren't constantly stumbling across unexpected results (which are written as surprises, that term has a different meaning in scientific papers than in the general public), then you aren't exploring new areas. As a scientist, you work by taking an existing model or hypothesis, and pushing it to its limits, finding where it breaks down, and creating a new, better model that accommodates a wider area. There are precious few cases where such models are sufficiently complete that we have run out of things to test ... low-energy fundamental particle physics seems to be the best-known one. In biology, which is the field I work in, we aren't even remotely close.
Take paleontology, for instance. One a seemingly monthly basis, new dinosaur species are being discovered, or old bones are realized to have been put together wrong, or new details about extinctions have been discovered. For that field, much of the surprise comes from additional data sources -- our older, simpler models were based on less data, and with additional information, better models can be built. Dinosaurs, when I was a kid, were thought to all be lizard-like in appearance. Recent discoveries of exceedingly well-preserved specimens suggest many of them had feathers, and were colored.
Take planetary sciences / cosmology. We have discovered a vast trove of objects in our solar system, thanks to new streams of data. We have discovered large numbers of planets beyond our solar system, also thanks to new streams of data. The better we build our telescopes and sensors, the better a picture of the cosmos we get. Each increase in available resolution continues to bring surprises because we do not have fully-developed models of the universe.
Take geology. Plate tectonics was validated only about 50 years ago. We don't know for sure that the same thing happens on other planets.
And biology. The combination of Darwin, and Watson and Crick seemed to explain all of evolution. Except that, as we look more and more closely, there *are* acquired traits that are inherited ... they're just not the dominant means of evolution. Our tools are getting better and measuring with finer molecular detail, revealing secrets of the scaffolding around DNA and the immense role it plays in determining externally observable characteristics.
Or sleep. We actually understand much of the metabolic mechanism for sleep, now. There is a real rejuvenation process. But we wouldn't have understood that without new tools that allow us to probe at high temporal and spatial resolution, and with fine molecular resolution using genetic tools.
In short, scientists are surprised because we discover new things all the time. We remain on the cusp of wide troves of knowledge, all of which is new. Each new revolution in data collection brings with it a new, unexplored realm and, as is written in many papers, surprises.
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Scientists aren't surprised. That's just the language that is used to describe findings that don't match up with existing dogma.
Dogma isn't in science. You have your hypotheses, and your theories. Hypothese run anywhere from what Scientists call a WAG or wild ass guess, to well thought out ideas. Theories are when at least some hypotheses have some experimental weight behind them. The theories span the whole range from "looks interesting" to "Almost a certainty'
Dogma does not accept change, it's more in the world of religion, trickle down economics, or infinite genders.
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"Physics aside, our models of it tend to be simple."
Physics isn't special. Fundamental physics has simple models that describe exceedingly simple systems extremely accurately. As soon as you scale up to anything that's a little more complicated (like a whole nucleus) you need to use effective theories, which are pretty much like the ones you find in most other sciences.
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Speak for yourself... As a scientist, I'm regularly surprised, especially in the field of Machine Learning. I don't think people understand the incredible number of ways that these things can fail (it borders on the absurd). When the darn thing works, it's by far an exception instead of the rule, and it's very pleasantly surprising.
~D
Question is malformed (Score:2)
The entire question is malformed. Classic example of cherry picking bias.
Part of it is click-bait headlines. When do you ever see "scientists surprised" in a technical paper? Never.
But most of it is scale. You have millions of scientists around the world doing experiments across thousands of disciplines every day. Of course a few of them will make surprising discoveries. It would be shocking if no one ever discovered anything new.
The question sounds like major aspects of scientific knowledge are
Why do people ask slashdot obvious questions? (Score:3)
"Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?"
By definition, if you discover something, it is surprising. This is seriously how low slashdot has fallen? Accepting questions that make it obvious that the poster doesn't understand the language? So sad, so fucking sad.
click me! (Score:2)
Easy (Score:2)
PS (Score:2)
Unexpected results (Score:5, Interesting)
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I studied some of the mechanical and contractile properties of smooth muscle. In spite of vast morphological differences between smooth muscle and striated (skeletal) muscle, smooth muscle demonstrated qualitatively similar results as striated muscle. https://www.pnas.org/content/7... [pnas.org]. The surprise here is that form and function do not necessarily follow each other.
Sounds like research into Fleshlights.
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I studied some of the mechanical and contractile properties of smooth muscle. In spite of vast morphological differences between smooth muscle and striated (skeletal) muscle, smooth muscle demonstrated qualitatively similar results as striated muscle. https://www.pnas.org/content/7... [pnas.org]. The surprise here is that form and function do not necessarily follow each other.
Sounds like research into Fleshlights.
ok I'll bite. How is this related to Fleshlights? Did you look at the link I posted or any of the citations?
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ok I'll bite. How is this related to Fleshlights? Did you look at the link I posted or any of the citations?
Twas a joke about smooth muscles. You know, like.... well you know...
Re: Unexpected results (Score:2)
You'd be shocked if you saw a unicorn. (Score:2)
That's because you have a lot of experience with what is normal and abnormal in this world, enough to understand how surprising a unicorn on Main Street is. But there is nothing impossible about the anatomy of a unicorn; indeed nothing particularly implausible. If you *read* about a unicorn cantering down Main Street in a fantasy novel, you wouldn't be particularly shocked, unless the author was amazingly good.
When you are a toddler, an unusually small or large dog on Main Street is a wonder. Most people
Really? (Score:2)
"the sheer number of times scientists consider something to be 'scientifically impossible', are badly disproven by some kind of new finding or discovery a few years later, and then express 'surprise' that 'X is indeed possible"
Name three such times.
I can't think, off the top of my head, of a reputable scientist who a) said something was impossible that b) was speaking for the community as a whole where c) it was then proven to be possible, and c) they were then surprised that it was possible.
Maybe over 50-1
Not impossible. (Score:2)
The Scientific Method (Score:2)
The Scientific Method is somewhat to blame. The premise is that everything is false until proven to be true, and to go there one must provide a theory and then prove it. This requires that you think of a theory first and propose it. This alone means that you have to think of an answer to a question. By definition if your tests result in something other than you expect, you are already surprised. Then the whole scientific method is pessimistic. Take Bigfoot. whether one believes in Bigfoot or not, Big
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I propose that the scientific method has a flaw. It should become optimistic at some point. If there are hundreds of Bigfoot sightings in a year, as some of the researchers claim, then it becomes unlikely that all are hoaxes or misidentification, so maybe the scientific method should then assume that Bigfoot is likely to exist and is undetectable for some reason.
The scientific method isn't a strict rule set. It wasn't until 1934 that the philosopher Karl Popper contributed [wikipedia.org] to its modern interpretation with the concept of falsification [wikipedia.org], by which attempts are made at disproving hypotheses rather than proving them. If the hypothesis survives repeated good-effort falsification attempts, then it may be promoted to a theory. But if the hypothesis gets falsified, then the study's null hypothesis [wikipedia.org] (i.e. status quo) continues to apply.
What you seem to be suggesting for the m
I suggest that (Score:2)
They ignore history (Score:2)
Pretty much anything mankind has ever 'known' has eventually turned out to be incorrect.
It shouldn't surprise anyone when something is disproven.
As a person who experienced this closely (Score:2)
My senior advisor who passed away 20 years ago taught us that true scientific discovery happens and is recognized when you make it sound so obvious that everybody is astonished: "how on earth we did not see this before?".
What was astonishing in early history of science was the mesmerizing simplistic beauty of new: epicycles were tedious, boring, repetitive, ad hoccerish (adhoccer.adhockey player - you heard that here first), while Kepler's laws were weeping-inducing elegant and aesthetically pleasing.
Nowada
My girlfriend's answer (Score:2)
My girlfriend's answer was that if you do a bunch of tests and repeatedly get negative or boring results, then when something new happens you're surprised.
My answer is that it's media, and that scientists want to sound surprised so that they continue to get funding. Same reason you keep seeing the word "slammed"in politics all the time now: media spin. Media wants attention.
It starts with curiosity (Score:2)
Once you can formulate a new approach and explain an answer to these questions you become a successful scientist.
Even for yourself but especially for the laymen the explanation might look surprising, who cares, you found the solution.
And very likely a new question has now arisen.
What's your example? (Score:2)
This whole submission strains to avoid any examples of what it's talking about. Maybe if you could be a little more specific than asking us all to search for different things and attempt to find some case of "scientifically impossible." Did someone travel faster than light or something like that, and I just missed it? That would be a good case to talk about, if that's what you mean. Or was it something else?
Scientists who are not ... (Score:2)
... surprised are not learning a goddam thing.
Are they really surprised, or is it reporting? (Score:2)
Is it possible that scientists are so surprised so often of the time because "surprised" make a better headline? Look at the overuse of "surprised", "shocked" and "couldn't believe what they saw" in the last few years in all types of news.
The news industry makes money by selling content or selling advertising when you view the content. There's a perception (probably true) that "shocked at what they found" "scientists surprised" "discovered the impossible" and such hyperbole gets fingers on buttons or (muc
They usually aren't (Score:2)
Headlines? (Score:2)
One wonders how many scientists were "surprised" only in news articles...
How much of this "surprise" is down to newspapers trying to sell the story?
Double bind (Score:2)
Often, unsurprising findings are published, or previous results are confirmed. And then, people make comments like, "What? They needed a grant from the NSF to figure that out? I could have told you that!" There's no winning with some people.
Group != individual (Score:2)
Who do so many people, having knowledge of the fact that suprises happen in health all the time, continually express "surprise" when they find that they have cancer?
Why do so many people, having knowledge of the fact that robberies happen all the time, continually express "surpise" when they get robbed.
When something happens
Who is being surprised here? (Score:2)
Is it the researchers, or is it the journalists who are reporting on the science?
Bad reporting (Score:3)
Headlines that say "New finding shocks scientists" are almost always clickbait written by reporters who don't know what they're talking about. Scientists are rarely very surprised by their results. You don't know in advance what the result will be, but it usually is somewhere in the range where you thought it might be. Truly surprising results are rare. But when they do happen, they of course get a lot of press.
Incorrect assumptions (Score:2)
They aren't shocked, yelling Eureka, having their entire worldviews damaged, or any of the other hysteria that media seems to want you to think happened.
They also try to damp down assumptions that aren't based in facts so they certainly don't expect unicorns and rainbow-poop, leave that for the wackjobs and conmen. Scientists intentionally limit themse
Simply because... (Score:2)
Scientists are often wrong, while science is never wrong. So scientists are either surprised they're right or they're completely wrong and surprised by what they find.
Scientists discover bricks not great at flight (Score:2)
Discover (verb) find (something or someone) unexpectedly or in the course of a search.
The majority of surprising discoveries fall into two categories:
. A contradiction of previously held notions,
. Unanticipated finding
It's largely the lottery phenomenon: "There's 10^6 dollars behind one of these doors" "Number 2" *cheers* But you knew the prize was there, you knew it was behind 1/3 doors, so why does *anyone* have a reaction to the correct selection?
Powered heavier-than-air flight was a "discovery" when we
consider the source (Score:2)
> If you do a Google News search for the keywords "scientists were surprised..."
Injecting irony into a story makes the story more stimulating. Are you samping scientists, or are you sampling people who need to sell stimulating stories over and over?
Not surprised (Score:2)
No, scientists aren't getting constantly "surprised" or even "baffled". These are words journalists are putting in their mouths as a way of making a story more interesting.
Re: Because it gives you more funding (Score:2, Interesting)
Yep. More people read a 'surprising' article, than something about 'theory z confirmed/rejected'.
Surprises are more interesting, hence no surprise that scientists are surprised. Especially if the topic isn't too hot.
They didn't act surprised about the Higgs boson, because it was hot enough on its own. No marketing tricks needed to sell that story.
Re: Because it gives you more funding (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the Reporters writing the news stories that are surprised
Eh .... no. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Scientests aren't actually surprised It's the Reporters writing the news stories that are surprised
No, scientists do not operate in absolute certainty of what they will discover, they are regularly surprised by what they discover. It is the religionists who have absolute certainty because they are the only ones I have met that claim they can explain everything in the universe, ... with a collection of ancient religious texts and the fickle opinions of their clergy.
Re:Eh .... no. (Score:4, Funny)
It you expected it, it's not much of a discovery, is it?
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It you expected it, it's not much of a discovery, is it?
So why ask "Why are scientists are constantly surprised by what they discover? Seems like a silly question to me, surprise kind of goes with the territory if you do science. If you want absolute certainty go and become a born-again Christian.
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It is a silly question, but I think not (exactly) for that reason.
You *hear* about scientists being "surprised", because that means they've discovered something. They might not actually be surprised, but as others have pointed out, journalists like to say they are.
You don't hear about everything scientists (and everyone else) do every day that works out exactly, unsurprisingly, as it should. Although if you're comparing science to religion, that's the part that really matters. Science is fundamentally the
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It is a silly question, but I think not (exactly) for that reason.
You *hear* about scientists being "surprised", because that means they've discovered something. They might not actually be surprised, but as others have pointed out, journalists like to say they are.
You don't hear about everything scientists (and everyone else) do every day that works out exactly, unsurprisingly, as it should. Although if you're comparing science to religion, that's the part that really matters. Science is fundamentally the pursuit of models that can be used to make reliable predictions.
The goal of science is boring reliability. The exciting part of science is surprises, because that means you get to contribute something to achieving a future lack of surprises.
Probably, but judging by conversations I've had with scientists their favourite part of the job is WTF!! moments. For example, when they discover some really weird ass cosmic phenomenon like Tabby's star, find pre-Columbian native American DNA in Scandinavians or that time they went looking for Y-chromosome Adam, determined the modern human Y-chromosome is 75.000 year old and then found a 338.000 year old Y-chromosome during a routine commercial ancestry analysis procedure.
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This is one solid reason.
The media fucks up a lot of shit. Scientists can publish in-progress or speculative results and the media, whose business model is to attract eyeballs, pumps that up to solid, verified fact with a whole bag of consequences.
I remember early on reading that brontosaurs could have possibly communicated with loud grunts.
The Enquirer came out with the following headline:
BRONTOSAURS HONKED LIKE BUICKS!!
to be more precise : they want to sell stuff (Score:2)
Re: Because it gives you more funding (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, that was what I came up with first too. I was a scientist for a long time, and of course sometimes nature surprises you, but to get funding you need to use every superlative in your tool set, and 'suprising' seems to work well even with stuff you didn't find that surprising. And ince you have funding the money givers will want to hear great stories, so there we go again.
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Further, most of the popular scien
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Of course nobody gives money to a charity that has the job of helping the slightly disadvantaged. It is human nature to shout louder to be fed as anyone with many siblings will know. The thing is society has no parents to dispasionately hand out the goodies, only "the market" and whether an emotional response can be generated. No suprise then that everything in the media is always being shouted at volume 11.
Surprising results often wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
They didn't act surprised about the Higgs boson, because it was hot enough on its own.
No, we were not surprised because it had been predicted as a solution in 1964. Then we built a massive collider and two huge experiments specifically to search for it. Anyone who expressed surprise at finding it in 2012 would have to have been an idiot.
Indeed the vast majority of recent surprises in particle physics have been exactly the opposite to what the article suggests. In our case, the surprises have generally turned out to be someone making a serious error. For example, the claim of a faster than light neutrino surprised everyone because it violated relativity. The eventual result was that it was caused by a cable that was not properly plugged in, which was a result that surprised nobody.
A similar thing happened a few years ago at the LHC where both experiments started to see signs of a surprising new resonance. However, as more data were collected the significance declined and it appears that it was just a statistical fluke. So in my experience surprising results are usually the ones that turn out to be wrong which is what you expect when you have a good understanding of what you are studying.
If you have lots of surprising results which turn out to be right then you clearly have a very poor understanding of whatever you are studying because the predictions of your theoretical model are constantly being proved wrong.
Same reason most people are politicians (news) (Score:3)
Looking at the news* on CNN.com today, I see that about 85% of people are politicians, and almost all are doing something crazy today.
Or maybe it's called NEWs because it's something NEW, something at least somewhat unexpected.
Neither the popular press nor the science news reported "the sun rose today - in the morning!", precisely because that's not surprising. "Guy goes to work, does his job, and gets a paycheck" isn't surprising - and therefore you don't hear about it. "Boss gives every employee a $20,00
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"Guy goes to work, does his job, and gets a paycheck"
Excpet that the news today is "Guy goes to work, does his job, and doesn't get a paycheck."
Funny (Score:2)
That was funny, thanks.
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Yes, but if you conduct an experiment to see if one of two possibilities happens either outcome is not surprising.
God continuously invents science. (Score:2)
Full stop.
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Re:God continuously invents science. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is interesting about science it that science - at least today - KNOWS very well that there is A LOT that we have yet to explain fully or discover. Science KNOWS that we humans, basically, know only how SOME of how the universe we live in functions. And yet many scientists are SO CERTAIN that there is no God, or any kind sentient intelligence that created or designed the vast universe that we are a tiny part of.
Your language is sloppy, and it suggests your analysis may be as well. Yes, science accepts that it is not yet "complete". There are explanations for a few observed phenomenon that are not yet incorporated into the existing body of scientific understanding. Introduction of a God or multiple Gods into the discussion is pretty much irrelevant to the "completeness" of scientific understanding. Why? Because statistics. So far, zero of observed phenomenon that have been explained have required the involvement of a God or multiple gods. Zero. None. Nada. Zilch. Bupkiss.
More, the obscurity of the few observed phenomenon that have not yet been incorporated into scientific understanding continues to become increasingly massive. Invocation of God or Gods used to be required to "explain" such trivial experiences as fire, disease, earthquakes, lights in the sky, and pregnancy. Now we understand these things, to such a degree that God or Gods are no longer required for any of them. We now live in a time where "don't share needles" is all the wisdom required, and "go ahead and share needles with another junkie but you'll be fine as long as you pray" is laughable. It's comedic. Even among the religious community, reliance on scientific understanding is widespread enough that they would view someone who just prays they don't contract AIDS from unprotected sex with a carrier as delusional.
To recap, the utter and total lack of requirement for God or Gods in 100% of what we know - which is vast - makes the lack of belief in God quite understandable. And mostly, sensible.
This is not just contradictory, but downright dangerous.
You're going to have to demonstrate that. There's no contradiction. At all. "I don't know everything, but nothing I do know - which is virtually the entire scope of my observed experience - even remotely suggests there is a God or Gods, so I suspect there is no such entity or entities." Not contradictory. Or dangerous.
Basically, scientists who know VERY WELL that they only UNDERSTAND PART OF FUNCTIONING THE UNIVERSE and HAVE NO IDEA WHATSOEVER WHERE OUR UNIVERSE CAME FROM are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that there can be no such thing as God.
Oh. You don't understand atheists or scientists. Let me help. First, yes, atheists believe there are no Gods. But... were there evidence or - Heaven forbid - proof of the existence of such, they'd be willing to accept they had been mistaken. Second, scientists are even more willing to accept change. That's how science works. If a theory or working model of a situation is tested and demonstrated by further data to be false, the theory or working model is either invalidated or updated to incorporate the new data. Neither atheists nor scientists are - as a rule - certain they are right. The believe, according to the evidence at hand, that they are. But certainty is not part of their worldview.
WTF? That's about as logical as saying "I have never actually physically travelled to Ethiopia, but I know everything everything there is to know about Ethiopa nevertheless."
False. It's exactly as logical as saying "to date virtually everything humanity has observed has had a non-deity explanation and every day more of the incredibly obscure observations we haven't explained are explained, and continue to have non-deity explanations, so the unanimous body of evidence predicts the non-existence of deities."
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Basically, scientists who know VERY WELL that they only UNDERSTAND PART OF FUNCTIONING THE UNIVERSE and HAVE NO IDEA WHATSOEVER WHERE OUR UNIVERSE CAME FROM are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that there can be no such thing as God. WTF? That's about as logical as saying "I have never actually physically travelled to Ethiopia, but I know everything everything there is to know about Ethiopa nevertheless."
No, I think it's more like saying "I have never physically travelled to Ethiopia, but I'm pretty sure it's not populated by two-headed dogpeople with telepathy."
I am absolutely not certain at all that there was no creator. But based on what has been discovered, the creator's scope of action is SEVERELY limited. For instance, we know that someone didn't take a rib from man and create woman, at this point we're pretty sure on that, likewise we're pretty sure the earth wasn't just formed wholesale with every
Day-age creationism (Score:2)
We can't prove that there wasn't a shadowy actor who made slight nudges to evolution over the course of billions of years to lead amino acids to humanity.
In other words, we cannot yet disprove theistic evolution [wikipedia.org].
Personally, I have nothing against you if you want to believe in a god who made really tiny nudges like that, good on you
Nor do I.
but that's not the god most religious people appear to believe in.
Many Christian denominations, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, accept the scientific consensus that Earth is billions of years old. Old Earthers since Saint Augustine in the fifth century have reconciled this with the creation week of Genesis 1 using a day-age theory [wikipedia.org], citing other scripture to justify interpreting a "day" of creation as a metaphor for an arbitrarily long era. Some day-agers accept evolution in a theistic form; others, the progre [wikipedia.org]
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Er, science did start out on the believe that god was real. Geologists for example started out with the hypothesis that the flood created a lot of geology, but the more they studied geology, the more it was obvious that various processes formed the current geology over billions of years. Biologists, started out believing in life spontaneously appearing, as created by god, and then various facts pointed to a long history of evolution forming life as we know it. Most refinements in science have eliminated the
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Or is it just the spin out by the reporters?
Are there scientific papers that exclaim the surprise?
I haven't read any.
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It is such a pity that scientists doing research very often do not publish their negative results.
They design an experiment in order to gain knowledge about a hypothesis, in the expectation that their results will support their hypothesis.
All too often, after a few months of negative results, they give up and move onto something else, leaving the work unpublished.
Negative results are often as interesting as positive results, in fact, often more so!
And that info needs to get out there, before some other poor
Re: (Score:3)
> What causes religion? Ego.
That's an incomplete answer.
While it is true that sometimes, sadly usually more often then not, men are motivated by greed, power, and ego to start a religion, however, you are assuming that is the ONLY reason. It is not.
You are forgetting that some people WANT to help others. My local churches donate their time and money to help the less fortunate. Do you? They are doing it because they understand the Golden Rule: Treat others how you want to be treated and indirectly the
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/sarcasm I'd rather be known for having an ego then being an anonymous coward who resorts to ad hominem fallacies.
Do you have a specific complaint or do you just like to whine?