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For several reasons it looks like this is an important time to talk about perception vs. reality when it comes to what makes a good scientist and a good discovery. A thread…
A while back I was asked to write and film a lecture series using the title “Great Heroes and Discoveries of Astronomy”. I agreed, but with the caveat that a key focus of the course would be examining what we mean when we talk about scientific “heroes”… https://twitter.com/emsque/status/1361008594414571521
We’re often sold the narrative of a “lone genius” ignoring crowds of naysayers and bravely persevering to bring some earth-shattering new discovery to the world. It sounds exciting, it gives us a hero to root for, and it's a nice easy story to tell.
It’s also almost never true.
It’s also almost never true.
The field-shaking game-changing discoveries that we think of in retrospect as accomplished by lonely heroic champions - Hubble’s discovery of galaxies beyond our own and an expanding universe, or Einstein’s theory of general relativity - were, in fact, nothing of the sort.
Every big astronomy discovery that I cover in the series - EVERY SINGLE ONE - has an origin story that begins with years of work by dozens of people painstakingly laying the groundwork for a few more hardworking researchers who then nudged science over some key new threshold.
(an example: to talk about Hubble and our expanding universe you also HAVE to talk about Henrietta Leavitt, Heber Curtis, Vesto Slipher, Milton Humason, & Walter Baade, to name just a few. and that’s not even getting into the role that Einstein and Lemaitre played in the story…)
If someone loudly proclaims themselves as the “first” or “sole” person advocating for some grand new theory or idea, both they and their theory inevitably land somewhere between “immature” and “wrong”. It’s simply not how science works.
Moreover, every great discovery - EVERY SINGLE ONE - has grown stronger & more remarkable under intense examination by other experts. The science has flourished because of colleagues pulling it apart, exploring every angle, demanding “are you SURE?”, and listening to the answers.
(one reason the scientific community is so overwhelmingly behind the vitally important science of climate change or vaccines or similar is BECAUSE numerous experts have rigorously tested it and seen it pass those tests)
True scientific heroes invite scrutiny, not sensation. They want to be right, not first. They want to be accurate, not loud. This may be at odds with how we write headlines and tell stories, but it’s very much in line with how good science works and how great discoveries happen.
