Sometimes, it takes a long time before you are proven right. Not that too many people seriously doubted Einstein’s prediction that gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space – existed. However, it wasn’t definitively proven until 2016, nearly a 100 years after the Jewish scientist first posited their existence. Even in 2016, with the technology available, it took a major event to trigger waves large enough to be detected. That event was the collision of two black holes over a billion light years away.
In 2012, the Higgs boson particle was finally discovered. Predicted back in the 1960s, the subatomic particle was needed to complete the Standard Model. Once the Large Hadron Collider finally proved the particle’s existence, physicists could say that they had a solid grasp of the fundamentals of how subatomic particles behave.
It would be easy to go from these and other discoveries and say that everything is going perfectly smoothly in the world of physics. However, that would be to ignore all of the crazy things going on that we have no clue how to explain. Just take dark matter. There is a lot more of it in the universe than there is visible matter. The ratio seems to have gone down, from 10/1 to 6/1 likely thanks to more accurate analysis as well as people just getting better at detecting normal matter. How much of the change in the ratio is taken up by the discovery of extrasolar planets, or that neutrinos actually do have a tiny bit of mass? Yet, there is also a large amount that we can’t account for. There is also dark energy, which has no relation to the concept of dark matter. It’s just a term for the energy that might be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. Yes, that’s a thing. And let’s not even get into quantum mechanics where things get really weird.
Pretending everything is chugging along smoothly would also ignore the fact there are issues that are more political than scientific to be dealt with. That comes into play especially when scientists are delving into those strange and mysterious elements, the places we don’t understand. That’s because the discoveries that come from research into those poorly understood fields sometimes have implications for what we consider to be established science. Those who have made their careers on things like orbital mechanics, star formation, how gravity works, and so forth don’t much like people telling them their theories are wrong.
Einstein himself fell prey to this. When he was still working out his theory of relativity the common understanding of the universe was a steady state model. It had always been here much as we see it today. He and others were resistant to the Big Bang Theory that was getting peddled by one Fr. George Lemaitre. Einstein was so resistant he actually added a fudge factor into his equations called the cosmological constant that would make the answers compatible with a steady state model. Einstein later removed it, calling it his greatest blunder.
If Einstein didn’t care about having his preconceptions challenged, it’s no wonder that scientists today struggle with the same impulses, though now, it is perhaps even worse. There are various incentives to not rock the boat. Too many are primarily interested in getting tenure at their universities, or getting their grant money from the government. Pursuing those goals rather than the truth means that new ideas aren’t just treated with suspicion, they can be flat out suppressed, holding back not just a particular scientist, but science as whole, thus limiting our ability to understand the world around us. That is precisely why we need more openness, more transparency in our data, so that others can go into it and research things for themselves and hopefully learn to be open to whatever the truth may be.
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