Learning from Mistakes in Mainstream Science
Evidence based science is our best path for gaining new knowledge about the physical reality that we all share. The engine that drives science forward is all about testing novel theoretical ideas by experimental data. Its successes are evident in the latest technologies of CRISPR gene editing, artificial intelligence, quantum information technologies and GPS navigation, that make our life today so much better than that of past generations. But despite the shiny veneer laid out by leading scientists and reporters, the scientific method also offers the most spectacular displays of the failures of the human mind to imagine what reality is like.
Over the past decade, the Nobel prize in physics was primarily given to “old news,” namely ideas that were proposed decades ago, such as the Higgs mechanism, neutrino oscillations, gravitational waves, exoplanets, black holes, or quantum entanglement. Why is it that new ideas are not celebrated as often as they were a century ago, when the fundamental principles of relativity, quantum mechanics and particle physics were discovered? One possible explanation is that the century-old discoveries represent low-hanging fruits. The high-hanging fruits are difficult to collect and ideas about their nature are highly speculative and often wrong.
An alternative explanation is that the physics community became too dogmatic and risk-averse about the directions worth pursuing. Taking the wrong mainstream paths and not exploring alternatives brings the community to scientific dead ends, rich in mathematical gymnastics but with no experimental support — the traditional prerequisite for verified descriptions of reality. In this ecosystem, the professional success of theoretical physicists is gauged by their mathematical virtuosity rather than by their success in figuring out the nature of reality. For example, the concept of a multiverse containing regions of spacetime to which we have no access, garnered recently more mainstream attention than the search for technological signatures from extraterrestrial civilizations in the billions of Earth-Sun analogs within the Milky-Way galaxy.
To figure out how to correct the course, we must admit the mistakes of the mainstream and learn from them. Innovation can only blossom if it is properly nurtured, because the human mind naturally drifts to maximize the number of “likes” it gets in echo chambers saturated by stories that are not necessarily substantiated by facts.
Let me be clear. I am focusing here on the mainstream of the physics community which includes thousands of brilliant scientists. This is not a fringe community which branched off to the side, but the community that represents what is considered to be the most reasonable thing to do among the most celebrated practitioners of the profession. Learning from the mistakes of our herd is the only way for us to figure out how to improve the efficiency of the engine of scientific discovery.
There are plenty of examples to contemplate from the past half a century of fundamental physics. Consider supersymmetry, an idea embraced by the mainstream as a likely foundation for string theory, and as an explanation of dark matter in the form of the lightest (and hence stable) supersymmetric particle. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider did not find supersymmetry in its natural range of parameters. In parallel, for four decades, direct detection experiments did not find a supersymmetric weakly-interacting massive particle, leading to upper limits that are well below expected values. Similarly, the initially compelling idea of cosmic inflation led to its natural conclusion that anything can happen in the multiverse and allowed us to reverse engineer anything we find in our Universe as part of an infinite range of possibilities. Also, the idea of unifying quantum mechanics and gravity in extra spatial dimensions within the context of string theory did not yield a unique mathematical framework with testable predictions, constituting a dead-end from the perspective of evidence-based science.
Navigation mistakes are common among mainstream leaders. Albert Einstein argued between 1935 and 1939 that quantum mechanics should not have “spooky action at a distance,” that gravitational waves do not exist, and that black holes do not form. These mistakes should not be regarded as stains on Einstein’s career, but rather as testimonies to the nature of science as a learning experience in which mistakes are as important as successes. Attention to Einstein’s three mistakes led to three Nobel Prizes in physics over the past decade, awarded to the experimental teams that proved Einstein wrong on all three fronts.
What is the lesson to be learned from the mistakes of the mainstream? An important insight is that resources should be spread among a diverse set of approaches to figuring out the unknown. For example, instead of investing over ten billion dollars only in the search for microbes — as advocated by the mainstream of the astronomy community these days, we should hedge our bets and allocate a similar level of funding to the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures. Of course, extraterrestrial intelligence might be rare but its signatures might be easier to detect. Without a dedicated search for evidence, we might never find it. If we chose to change course and invest billions of dollars on theoretical and experimental research associated with extraterrestrial civilizations and not find anything after forty years, then this research community will have the same record as the mainstream community that focused on the search for dark matter over the past forty years. Are taxpayers more reluctant to explore the question: “Are we alone?” than they are to fund the search for the nature of dark matter? What counts as risky by the mainstream is often based on prejudice or psychological biases.
We better admit that all of us are searching in the dark. But raw curiosity, rather than prejudice, regarding the questions that matter most to society should propel science forward. In hedging our bets to promote innovation, we should fund multiple paths of exploration for each fundamental question. For example, when searching for a guide on how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, we should explore novel experimental tests of quantum gravity rather than novel mathematical structures beyond our cosmic horizon. When searching for extraterrestrial life, we should search for primitive life as well as technological life. When searching for extraterrestrial technological signatures, we should search for interstellar artifacts near Earth and not just radio or laser signals from exoplanets. This all sounds like common sense, but common sense is not always common within the echo chambers of the mainstream.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
