What is trust?
According to the Oxford Languages dictionary trust is: “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.”
For many situations, trust in knowing what a person thinks, how they feel, or how they’ll behave is not black or white, but some of shade of gray in between. We cannot always say for sure just one way or the other.
Science is kinda like that too.
Science is not just a bunch of facts; it is a way of thinking and a process to discover how things work.
This process has worked phenomenally well since the days of the renaissance, and has led to enormous advances in all aspects of society from health and medicine to construction and business.
Usually the scientific process starts with a guess or hypothesis. That is followed by a test or experiment to test the guess. The result of the experiment is then analyzed to see if the guess was right or not.
That sounds simple enough, but what if the results show that the guess was 51% right. What does that mean?
Not much really, but sometimes the public will take one quick experiment that was done only one time as gospel truth followed by science hype that happens to fit somebody’s preconceived notion of how things work.
Scientists take a different approach.
When a scientist first hears or sees the 51% result, the first thought is often, “Hmm.” The next set of thoughts are questions about who did the experiment, where was it done, what exactly was done, how many times did they do it, were there any controls, how did the authors analyze the results, what do the authors think it means, and a bunch of other questions.
If the experiment was published in a scientific journal, then usually it is “peer-reviewed.” That means that the author’s submission is sent by the journal to other experts in the field. Those experts will examine all aspects of the paper, and they are not gentle. Most papers are rejected at first and are only published after the revisions satisfy the reviewers and journal editor.
In other words, if an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal it is pretty damn good.
Then, when other scientists see the article they often try to repeat it. If their experiments show the same results, then they’ll often expand the experiment to explain the results more effectively. If they cannot repeat the experiment, then they try to figure out why not. What went wrong? Was there an unknown variable that was not reported? Was the procedure wrong?
Sometimes in the process of trying to figure out why an experiment doesn’t work major discoveries are made. Sometimes, it turns out that the original researcher cheated.
The point is that science is an ongoing process that checks itself over and over and over. Nothing is taken as just fact.
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