When structural engineers want to know if a building will withstand an earthquake, they put a model on a shake table, crank up the vibrations, and try to make it collapse. If you want to know how sturdy something is, try to break it! This is called “destructive testing.” Whether shake testing a building, crash testing an automobile, or evaluating new software, destructive testing is the gold standard when you need confidence that something will work.
As a human endeavor, science can be as messy a business as the postmodernists imagine. But as a path to knowledge, science is anchored to reality by destructive testing, not of buildings or computer codes, but of ideas.
The philosopher who got the important part of science right was Karl Popper. In his 1934 work,
The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper said that the cornerstone of science is “falsifiability.” If you haven’t tried to show that an idea is false, then you know nothing about whether it is true. What’s more, if you don’t make falsifiable predictions, then what you are doing is not science, regardless of what you may call it.
Whether solving puzzles, staging revolutions, or having pizza and beer, scientists push on ideas. It’s just what we do. We don’t always like it when predictions fail. We might even try to look the other way! But truth will win out. Science is not purely objective, but ultimately it is democratic. Regardless of who you are, dishonesty is not tolerated. You don’t get to ignore evidence. And when a theory’s predictions fail, they fail in anyone’s lab.
Destructive testing of ideas tethers science to a reality that exists apart from any paradigm. When a structure on a shake table collapses, no social agreement is needed to see the resulting pile of rubble. And when previously conquered diseases reemerge in unvaccinated populations, suffering is real and indiscriminate.
The essence of science as I know it is freewheeling, out-of-the-box, ineffable human creativity followed by brutal, no-holds-barred intellectual violence. Scientists dream beautiful ideas and then batter those ideas with hard reality to see what breaks. Destructive testing is the gold standard for engineers. A well-tested scientific theory is the gold standard for human knowledge.
From creationism to climate change denial to homeopathy, there are a lot of postmodernist airplanes out there with open doors, inviting you to take a ride. Leave rationality at the door and hop on board if you like. But I don’t recommend it. Personally, I think I’ll stick with science.
Jeff Hester is a keynote speaker, coach, and astrophysicist. Follow his thoughts at
jeff-hester.com.