Hey Science! What are you trying to prove?

There is a certain thing that comes up from time to time in my courses and elsewhere. It's one of those things that is always mentioned in passing, cropping up like ugly little weeds along the path of discussion: bothersome, but fleeting enough that on no individual occasion is it really warranted to interrupt the discussion at hand to address it.

In class this morning, however, I spent half an hour listening to a presentation in which the presenter informed us of what the authors of a paper had aimed to prove, described how they tried to prove it, summarized what their results ended up proving, and went on to discuss the potential implications of what had been proven.

And every time the student uttered that P-word, I cringed inside (or I hope it was only inside). I wanted to stop him and proclaim: "This is science, not math! No one is trying to prove anything!"

Science is about uncovering truths to the best of our capabilities, with the understanding that there is always more to be uncovered and our capabilities themselves may improve over time -- that what we accept as true today may well be replaced with a new truth tomorrow. Scientists seek to uncover truths by making educated guesses about the nature of the world as well as predictions about what would happen, under specified conditions, if their guesses are correct. If what happens under those conditions turns out to match their predictions well enough, we might accept their guess as the Best Guess So Far regarding the nature of that aspect of the world. If the match isn't good enough, we go "Hm, nice idea, but guess again!" Similarly, if someone's guess conflicts with an older, previously accepted guess, but the predictions following from it match reality more closely than those of the old one, we might say "Gee, looks like that old guess wasn't quite right after all."

Rinse and repeat, and hopefully our Best Guesses So Far get ever closer to accurately representing how things actually work, enabling us to manipulate the world in ever cooler ways using this growing understanding of it. (And to the extent that these guesses allow us to manipulate the world as we'd like to, that degree of accuracy is good enough for the time being.)

A mentality of "trying to prove" that your guess is correct conflicts with the very basis of science. It hampers proper, rigourous experimental design. It poisons critical, unbiased evaluation of data. It makes drawing grounded, realistic conclusions nearly impossible.

Sadly, the science publication industry itself seems to reward only those who most convincingly "prove" the shiniest things, in spite of the value that all well-tested guesses contribute to our collective understanding of how the world works. (So maybe I'm wrong; maybe people end up trying to prove things after all. Publish or perish, as they say.) This distortion of science, as the authors of that essay put it, certainly doesn't help to give students the right idea of what science is all about, let alone a clear sense of what may or may not constitute good science.

And so this morning I sat listening to a classroom of graduate students talking, not about how convincing the authors' evidence was, nor whether their conclusions seemed reasonable, but about what the authors had proven, followed by sharing other examples they could think of that agree with what was proved. And suddenly this seminar course seemed to differ from a typical undergraduate one by barely more than the fact that it's not a professor who stands at the front of the room, but a student.