Scientists do not work in a vacuum, even—I can’t help punning—physicists who experiment in a vacuum regularly.
It’s easy to imagine hard science as being unmarred by the messiness of the humanities, but scientists are only human. In his book about quantum physics in the twentieth century, What Is Real?, Adam Becker tells a historical saga about how politics, war, personalities, and philosophy has affected the ways in which prominent scientists lived, worked, and thought.
Thus the charismatic Danish physicist Niels Bohr influenced what physicists believed about the quantum world for decades, just by dint of personality and institutional position.
Thus Albert Einstein and many other physicists fled from Europe to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s due to the rise of the Nazis. As a result of World War II and its aftermath, the center of quantum physics shifted from Europe to the U.S. This change in location, culture, and political milieu affected physicists’ work in terms of available jobs, funding opportunities, politics and the blacklisting of communists, and in-vogue philosophies.
Thus a young physicist named Hugh Everett III came up with an extremely original idea—the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum physics—but devoted most of his life not to theory, but to worldly pursuits more fitting to the times.
Most of all, Becker illuminates how the “Copenhagen interpretation” went virtually unchallenged for decades (though Einstein was a notable dissenter) due to accidents of history and culture. He notes,
“All of science is vulnerable to human biases and to influences from all the other spheres of human endeavor—politics, history, culture, economics, art—that some of those biases spring from.”
It makes one wonder: what are today’s unseen biases, and how are they skewing our modern worldview?
The unseen biases always become perfectly clear after someone or something points them out to us and of course in hindsight. We set up an experiment in haste to meet a corporate time line and to then realize after it’s too late that we left off an important control, the experiment. Those type of biased errors are easy to correct since the scope was small and only a few were affected, we simply repeat the experiment but do it correctly this time around.
But what if the scope is broad. Einstein escaping to the U.S. had a large scope and changed many lives forever. Who knows what’s happening in today’s political landscape. It’s not easy as taking another day of a busy week in order to correct a mistake due to unseen bias. Those type of mistakes, the ones with greater scope are irreversible.
One in the news today as I’m writing this on August 1, 2018 is the creation of plastic guns, potentially manufactured in any home with no regulations, drug use history or detection. The Trump administration unwittingly allowed this to almost become a legal Thing (Obama Admin has been having its thumb on it since around 2013 and has been in the courts via lawsuits, the creator has an agenda after all, some sort of bias we’ll call it). Thank god for the States to step in and adult this problem. But like any advance in technology, the genie is out of the bottle I’m afraid.
There was a reason God kicked out Adam and Eve for selecting the tree of knowledge, and we’re still paying for the bias
It’s interesting to hear your scientific perspective on striving to avoid bias in experiments. You make lots of other interesting points here, too.