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Business News/ Opinion / Online Views/  Does uncertainty allow scientists the right to remain silent?
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Does uncertainty allow scientists the right to remain silent?

The scientific method of experiments doesn’t mean it’s the universal password to make sense of every mystery in nature

Scientists monitor Hurricane Sandy at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida on 29 October. Had weather agencies in the US gone by the book and bet that Sandy would’ve been relatively tepid, they would’ve been in trouble. Photo: Reuters (Reuters)Premium
Scientists monitor Hurricane Sandy at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida on 29 October. Had weather agencies in the US gone by the book and bet that Sandy would’ve been relatively tepid, they would’ve been in trouble. Photo: Reuters
(Reuters)

The one positive thing that emerged from the events surrounding hurricane Sandy is that the forecasters got their prediction right. Several news websites have lauded the US weather service agencies for correctly anticipating that a whisper of an atmospheric disturbance six days ago would morph into the power-slamming Sandy.

Their effort is particularly laudable because Sandy, strictly speaking, ought not to have become the ravaging destroyer that it has.

As the news website New Republic explains: “Hurricanes typically draw their strength from warm tropical waters and are often pushed out to sea when they move north and encounter the prevailing westerly winds of the mid-latitudes. With Sandy initially moving into the Atlantic ahead of a cold front, hundreds of storms worth of precedent would dispose a forecaster to believe that the storm would have rapidly decayed, encountered wind shear and moved over the colder waters of the northern Atlantic. But while cold waters and strong upper-level winds usually combine to weaken tropical cyclones, Sandy actually intensified as it interacted with the same forces that usually destroy hurricanes."

What if the forecasters had got it wrong? Last week, an Italian court convicted six scientists of manslaughter, based on their inexact assessment of a 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila that killed at least 300 and affected over 120,000. The reason for the court’s ire was that a series of tremors in the days before the great quake had Italian seismologists saying that several smaller tremors wouldn’t necessarily translate into a big quake. That equivocation, according to the trial proceedings, was what cost them dear, though several independent scientists agree that the scientists have been punished for no fault of theirs.

Had weather agencies in the US gone by the book and bet that Sandy would’ve been relatively tepid, they would’ve been in trouble and yet the Italian scientists went exactly by what the textbooks told them about earthquakes and faced criminal flak. The natural question that follows is, should science be lauded when scientists make a leap of faith, and are right? Obversely, should we castigate scientists if they go by the book and end up being wrong? It isn’t the case that science must always bear the burden of certainty, but when it is uncertain, does it merit scrutiny or criticism? Does uncertainty allow scientists, much of them funded by taxpayers, the right to remain silent?

The strength of the scientific method is its reliance on testable claims, experiments and careful deductions and yet the history of scientific progress rests on lucky guesses and inexplicable insight. The scientific method is the best tool that we have to make sense of the world around us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the universal password to make sense of every mystery in nature.

That’s been the singular message of quantum mechanics, which essentially says that matter at its fundamental level cannot be understood in an intuitive, commonsensical way. Yet we are increasingly led to believe that if nature can be subjugated by technology, it necessarily follows that we understand it. As the sobering reality of earthquakes, cyclones and India’s annual attempts to forecast the monsoon reminds us, nothing could be further from the truth.

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Published: 31 Oct 2012, 05:32 PM IST
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