Science isn’t declared by a show of hands. Reality isn’t determined in the High Court, or by a vote in Congress. But if there are enough people with large enough megaphones and powerful enough platforms, it doesn’t matter much what science, properly interpreted, indicates. There is no universal judge to punish you for overstepping your intellectual bounds and, as long as you fool enough others, Queen Cersei’s advice to her son and heir Prince Joffrey still stands: “One day you’ll sit on the Iron Throne and the truth will be what you make it.”
It was settled science that banning alcohol was a good thing for American society in the 1920s. It was once settled science that the Earth was the centerpiece of God’s universe. In the highly erudite and Christian 11th century, the settled science for curing headaches was to cut open the scalp of the poor person desperately in need of aspirin (or the Hippocratic Oath) – and add salt.
“Facts change all the time,” wrote Samuel Arbesman, a complexity scientist formerly at Harvard in his 2012 The Half Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has An Expiration Date. “Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. Meat used to be good for you, then bad to eat, then good again; now it’s a matter of opinion.”
None of that is because the underlying reality changed: smoking was as deadly to the 1950s doctor who thought it harmless as it is to a 2-packs-a-day fellow today. What happened in between were three things: the evidence that smoking was harmful got better; as the evidence piled up, scientists doing the research gradually changed their minds (and older generation scientists died out); and new information trickled through to the public.
Any one of those steps can misfire. Evidence can be muddled, or outright fraudulent for a long time; scientists, being people too, can refuse to accept the evidence, or lean against it for considerable time; and the public can draw the wrong information from scientific results. In a sense, it’s more miraculous that we get anything right than it’s surprising that the majority of all research findings are false.
What that implies for the world of today and tomorrow is uncomfortable to those who think we can mandate scientific truths from above: that vaccines are safe and effective, that masks and lockdowns worked well, that climate change is a terrible danger of cosmic proportions, that energy for the 21st century can be supplied by low-density unreliable sources, that fat and salt are unhealthy but carbs are safe. What’s even more stunning is that The Science could possibly shift as quickly as the religious Covid-zealots have changed their minds in the last seventeen months: lab leak is tin-foil conspiracy, until Savior Biden was in and it was both permissible and the Consensus View; vaccines are safe and effective and harmless and crucial even for children to take – never mind that we didn’t have children or pregnant women in the trials, or we haven’t monitored long-term effects in a ~6-months old rushed product, with no downside liability for the companies issuing it.
A serious scientist holds scientific facts, theories, and hypotheses forever provisional: what we think we know can always be improved upon or change. That doesn’t mean we can never state anything with some degree of confidence or be pretty sure about some relationship in the real world. Some things, like gravity in conditions resembling our planet, we know fairly well. Others, like the Law of Demand or land area of North America, we’re fairly confident about – and they’re unlikely to shift any time soon. Why? We’ve observed them and refined our understanding of them for a very long time, and the observational tools and the theoretical underpinnings haven’t yet been debunked. Time matters; Lindy decides.
Others still are eternally in flux: the world record in the 100-meter sprint, the world’s chess champion, or the number of inhabitants of our planet. Still, they’re facts: not perhaps eternal scientific ones, but still statements about the world that are true. They can shift; our understanding of them can shift; or the spread of that shift in the wider population or political sphere can shift.