Flukes, Fakes, and Statistical Uncertainties: What Happens When Physicists Fail 

I used to have, what I’d call, a conventional view of science, scientists, and scientific facts. I believed in all of them implicitly.

Then, about thirty years ago – and purely as a business decision – my partner and I decided to see if we could make a business out of publishing newsletters on natural and alternative approaches to health.

That led to three decades of shock and surprises. I changed from a naïve believer in mainstream medicine to a skeptic, critic, and sometime “denier.”

In this essay, Harry Cliff talks about “the slippery nature of probability in the pursuit of scientific discovery.”

You’ll find it to be extremely thought-provoking if you are interested in learning about particle physics. If not, I recommend you read it anyway.

Cliff explains how scientists, even the most accomplished scientists, and even with the best intentions, can make mistakes that lead to conclusions that are just plain wrong. Wrong and, sometimes, vastly damaging.

This potential for making mistakes that cause widespread damage is – it seems to me – much worse today than at any time in my life. Our culture has Balkanized into various tribes of ideological thinking, the majority of which don’t want to accept the fragility of science – especially when the advertised scientific facts correlate with their political or social belief systems.