Scientfiic Uncertainty

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This morning at 8 a.m. EST — only a couple of hours after this column is published — at one of the most awaited press conferences of 2011, two groups of physicists will announce results from experiments run on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful accelerator. They will break news on the search for a long-and-feverishly sought fundamental particle called the Higgs boson, whose discovery would help to validate the theoretical framework for much of current physics.

At the risk of making a prediction that may therefore be laughably wrong by the time you read it, I will go out onto a short, sturdy limb and guess that the scientists' observations will be intriguingly suggestive of the Higgs… but fall well short of proof that it exists. The announcement will be rife with uncertainty, caveats, and disclaimers. I'll further argue, however, that the physicists' uncertainty is a hallmark of good science, not a failure of it — a point too often lost on unscientific critics.

To be sure, a certain amount of scientific grandstanding might be going on. Sometimes scientists do report results so weak and preliminary that outsiders wonder why they bothered — and the answer is often that the scientists felt a need to keep themselves or their work visible, perhaps to protect their funding. Maybe that will be the case with these Higgs announcements; maybe not. In a sense it doesn't matter to the scientific process, though, because uncertain, preliminary results are a natural step along the road to better, firmer ones.

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Knowing what you know

Uncertainty is a crucial strength of science, not a weakness. It's not merely an admission of ignorance but a quantified assertion about what is known confidently and reasonably. Yet science's embrace of uncertainty drives certain critics crazy — usually ones who find themselves on the losing side of an argument against science.

The tobacco industry harped for decades on the uncertainties in the medical literature linking smoking to cancer. In the late 1990s, then-GOP political consultant Frank Luntz wrote an influential memo (later leaked) that observed the "scientific debate is closing [against us]" and recommended emphasizing uncertainty in the climate science as the strategy most likely to sway the public away from taking global warming seriously. Representatives of the Discovery Institute, an intelligent-design creationism think tank, point to holes in the fossil record and unanswered questions about the evolution of life as proof that biologists don't know what they're talking about. Activists have also clutched at straws to make cases based on uncertainty against the safety of childhood vaccinations and genetically modified foods.

Such dogmatic thinking is at odds with what makes real scientific progress possible. The physicists at CERN can speak about tentative results on the Higgs boson today because months from now, without losing credibility, they can say that additional experiments have either upheld or disproved them. In words often (though unreliably) attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes: "When my information changes, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

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