They blinded me with science

How mistrust in science is becoming the norm.

You are a genuine connoisseur of classic movies if you can identify this still.

I recently came across an article, Mysterious Space Object Oumuamua, Not Alien, Scientists say, which rebutted unlikely claims that an extra-solar object the length of a few football fields, which entered our solar system back in October 2017, was some sort of alien craft. The piece, in the Wall Street Journal, details evidence gathered by scientists in the intervening six years which points to the conclusion that the object was just an unusual type of comet.

Comets are very common objects throughout the Universe. There is no evidence that Oumuamua, at any point along it's hyperbolic path around our sun, was controlled by anything other than the well-known forces that act on all celestial objects - despite, if you will forgive the pun, hyperbolic claims made to the contrary.

In the case of Oumuamua, the media's narrative was based on a sensational and unsubstantiated claim by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who believed that peculiarities in the orbit, appearance and brightness of Oumuamua could only be explained as the handwork of some alien intelligence.

This claim had little support in the scientific community. But just like Bigfoot, cold fusion and nutritional supplements, all one needs to achieve an imprimatur of respectability for even the wackiest idea from out where the buses don’t run, is to find someone in a lab coat willing to talk about it in front of a camera.

In an age where good information is literally at everyone’s fingertips, the number of those successfully hawking dubious science is nothing short of amazing. The more ludicrous the claim, the more the world seemingly beats a path to the claimant's door.

In this particular case, those who followed the Piper and echoed, with great enthusiasm and certainty, claims that the unusual albedo and non-gravitational movements of Oumuamua were proof that we'd had a close encounter with an alien intelligence, were clearly mistaken.

No offense to anyone's minutes of experience in Internet astrophysics, but we told you so.

The Oumuamua incident, in the grand scheme of things, is mostly much ado about nothing. People get wound up about silly things they substantively know very little about all of the time. Ignorance is seldom an impediment for people with PhD's in keyboard science to pontificate the Internet. It's Twitter's entire business model.

But the arc of the Oumuamua story comes with a cautionary message. Our overall scientific literacy in this country is terrible. Things that we should see as scientifically dubious, from miles away, we fall for because we are bereft in basic knowledge of science. Our average comprehension of what science is and how it works occupies whatever the next level below godawful happens to be.

Sometimes, scientific ignorance produces little more than exasperation. But other times, it can cause real harm. I think that we are living in the dawn of that era right now.

I written extensively about the death of expertise, nonsensical advice from experts, and mistakes in science. Standing for good science and exposing bad science was something that I took seriously during my academic career. It's more difficult that one might think. There is no dearth of poor science out there. In many cases, the worse the science happens to be, the more attention that it attracts. This is not a good conundrum for any technologically advanced society that intends to maintain itself for a long haul.

There are two salient questions surrounding our paucity of scientific comprehension. The first is why science is falling precipitously in most polls that gauge public trust. The second is who or what is to blame.

The second question is the easier of the two to answer. The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves. The long, tall and short of it is that we are, in terms of science, a dismally illiterate culture. It's just not at all where our priorities are.

I'm willing to bet more than I can afford to lose that while well more than 50% of the people in the United States know three Taylor Swift songs, well enough for karaoke, less than 5% can name Newton's three laws of mechanics, and far less than 1% can explain, in simple terms, what they mean.

Most Americans have no idea what the scientific method is or how it works. That's the reason that we are so easily led astray on a variety of matters that seem to be informed, to the unwitting, by science.

The scientific method has several steps, generally defined along the following lines. To engage in the scientific method, one must:

1. Develop a testable hypothesis (an untestable hypothesis is beyond the scope of science)

2. Perform experiments and/or gather data to test the hypothesis

3. Evaluate the data

4. Form a conclusion based on data analysis

5. Present findings for peer evaluation

There's actually a step “1a” in the real world, which is to convince peers to fund your research. Peer review is an essential component in science. An idea passes scientific muster only after it's been successfully vetted in peer review. This begins with convincing peers that your research displays enough potential to be worthy of funding, and ends when they are able to verify your results.

We are reaping the reward of having spent several generations demanding little in terms of breath, depth or rigor in math or science education, in kindergarten all the why through college. The number of people, even professionals, who don’t understand the first thing about math or science, at a substantive level, is alarming.

Case in point: a few years ago, New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay and MSNBC anchor Brian Williams demonstrated their incomprehension of fundamental math, on a national TV broadcast, when neither could cipher that $500 million divided among 327 million people would not give each American citizen $1 million.

Though ignorance of science is the what behind the growing mistrust in science, the reason why science is no longer regarded, by many, as the gold standard in trust is the behavior of some scientists. It’s not uncommon these days to find undisciplined scientists, way out over their skis, equating opinions, often driven by political agendas, to settled science.

When Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long time head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the chief medical advisor to the President from 2021 to 2022, famously stated that criticism of him for his opinions concerning the Covid pandemic was tantamount to criticizing science, itself, “because I represent science,” he did lasting harm to public trust in science.

Though Facui was correct in asserting that science evolves as our knowledge about any scientific issue increases, he was doing so in the context of having been wrong in several of his early Covid assertions. These assertions drove policies which impacted how we reacted to the Covid pandemic, with profound and occasionally deleterious consequences.

Dr. Fauci was too clever by half in many of his proclamations concerning the Covid pandemic - particularly with regard to the potential origins of Covid. When people who don’t understand much about zoonotic spillover, mRNA vaccines, biofilters, disease vectors, natural immunity or complex statistics, encounter a career government scientist proclaiming, with the force of law behind his words, things that they can see with with their own eyes aren’t true, it’s a recipe for distrust.

Just ask anyone who had anything to do with Chernobyl.

Fauci is far from the only scientist out there functioning more as an advocate than a neutral arbiter of what is true and what is not, he’s just arguably the most prominent, due to his misfortune in being tasked with forming our response to the Covid pandemic.

Look, to err is human. Scientists make mistakes. My opinion of Dr. Fauci, for what it’s worth, would be a lot higher if he would just admit that in the early days of the pandemic, he was under enormous pressure to make consequential decisions with very little reliable data. This resulted in mistakes, and a few of those had serious consequences. That does not mean that it’s all Fauci’s fault.

But Fauci’s proclivity for rewriting history to claim that science backed his play at every turn in the road is laughable without being funny. It just isn’t so. Science takes time and data, in the early days of Covid, there was precious little of either. In that austere space, opinions carried sway. All one would hope is that those issuing those opinions would understand that they could be out on a limb.

As for what to do about all of this? I don’t know. I’m about out of moves. I spent a quarter of a century doing my best to educate college students about math and science. And I wasn’t alone. There are thousands of dedicated science educators out there doing the same thing. But it’s a steep mountain to climb, and it’s surrounded with crevasses.

Academia is littered with courses that purport to teach science without much actual science or any math. I taught one such course, known as Descriptive Astronomy. The course catalog entry (over which I had no control) insisted that this course was entirely non-mathematical in nature. As soon as you mention that our sun is roughly 93 million miles from Earth, and that distance defines an Astronomical Unit, you’ve used math.

I heard about it too. A significant number of the students in a university level astronomy course were furious over the fact that we required them to make simple measurements in the lab which accompanied the lecture. Things like one inch on this photo equals 10 light years, so how many light years across the 10 inch photo?

It’s these students who now populate our professional classes. You’re damned right I’m worried.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth