Intel ISEF Discussion Panel
Nobelists to students: Being wrong may be just right
By Science News
Michael Kaplan, The Bronx High School of Science, Bronx, N.Y.
Thomas Huxley said “The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” If your theories about the future of your field were proven incorrect tomorrow, would you cling to your belief or abandon it in favor of a new idea? Would this frustrate you or [would you] be content with knowing how everything really works?
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Leon M. Lederman
It’s a curious question because if something that you expected to be right turns out not to be right, what you do is roll up your sleeves and fix it. Whenever there is something that goes wrong in science — and it goes wrong: There’s lessons like cold fusion and so on where scientists went completely wrong, and it was too bad because we were faced with the possibilities of limitless cheap power and it was all wrong and the scientists found out that it was wrong. So I think an essential ingredient in understanding why science progresses the way it does is that we know how to fix things when they are wrong. There may be individuals who are reluctant to change their own theories for personal reasons, but there is a community. And the community will insist that the science be correct. So I don’t think there’s any dilemma in addressing issues where science is wrong. The big collider that we’re all waiting to have operate in Geneva may produce something called the Higgs boson. On the other hand, it may not. If it doesn’t produce it then lots and lots of theoretical physicists will be embarrassed, but who cares about that? … The important thing is we’ve learned something very important about the way nature works and we will immediately go to try and improve that — that’s the way science progresses.