5 Truths You Should Know About Pursuing Pure Sciences

Have you wanted a learners perspective of science? Were you looking for an opinion? You’re in the right place.

It’s about model building, not the truth necessarily

Science is often pitched as the search for truth, the search for the fundamental building blocks of nature. Well, although that’s true overall, it doesn’t present the whole picture. Often times, scientists are only building a mathematical model or a representation of the actual world. This picture represents it the best:

Let me elaborate with two examples: the gender and the obsession with “beauty” in Physics. “In 2018 women made up 57.5% of all undergraduate students in the UK, but only 22.2% of physics undergraduates – and only 1.7% of all physics undergraduate students were black women” (source).

The search for “beauty” in equations has dominated physics for quite a while (since the 50s), this has been nothing less than a disaster. This lead to something called the “Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model”, whose predictions have been falsified and some of aspects of the theory still remain vague.

For more have look at this Physics world article that talks about both of the biases and the infamous “Strumia incident” or watch Sabine Hossenfelder break this down:

But these are issues tied to people whose attitude can be altered as time progresses, but is there a structural issue? YES! Citations i.e. the number of references a particular article gets is problematic. This is because citations measure popularity, not research impact. This is the academic equivalent of posting for the likes as Sabine Hossenfelder explains:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNeD2a95ROE

This is a dangerous trend that has steadily held it’s place for quite sometime. At the end of the day, scientists too are humans and are thus prone to the same biases. Degrees or years of training do not clamp down on the biases mentioned as do not have sessions or courses regarding cognitive biases or philosophy. Change is on the way, but science is far from ideal.

Final Thoughts

If my childhood idealism was a beautiful painting understanding these things felt like someone scribbled over it. I keep coming back to this quote for closure

The search for truth is more precious than its most assured possession.

• Gotthold Lessing

Pugazh Arasu is a senior in college majoring in theoretical physics with interests in mathematics, philosophy and computer science. The views expressed in this article are his own.