• Question: are scientist always right?

    Asked by thisistheusername to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 27 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hi thisistheusername

      No, scientists are not always right and we are not always certain are results are perfect. But what we do, is work on finding out when we are wrong, why we are wrong and on giving an estimate of how unsure we are. It’s very important that scientists are honest about this, so that people can trust us when we make a statement about our science.

      A big part of science is discussing your results with other scientists and this often allows the mistakes that we make to be pointed out and our work to be improved. It’s this community to science that really makes is fun to be in and makes science as strong as it can be!

    • Photo: Davie Galloway

      Davie Galloway answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      hi thisistheusername,

      the answer is NO scientists are definetly NOT always right … but sometimes that’s good as it then allows then to find out why there wrong and try to put things right

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      hey thisistheusername,

      No we aren’t always right but we try our best to be as right as we can be. No one is perfect and we make suggestions and predictions on the information we have. In the future we may get better information which makes us rethink our first idea. Science is a evolving process and things are constantly being changed and updated. That is why lots of scientist repeat other peoples work to make sure its right!

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hi thisistheusername,
      Absolutely not. Part of the role of a scientist is to come up with hypotheses about whatever it is they are working on. When a new hypothesis is developed, other scientists will think of experiments that can do, or other observations they can make, to test whether the hypothesis is matches what the experiments say. If a hypothesis provides a good match with lots of experimental data, then it is ok and accepted. If it doesn’t provide a good match, then it has to be rejected.

      So as a scientist, you have to come up with hypotheses. Sometimes, they’ll be accepted, which is great, but sometimes they’ll be wrong and you just have to accept that. One of the important things for a scientist is to be able to realise and accept when you’re wrong, because then you can realise what you did wrong and come up with something better next time.

    • Photo: Gemma Purser

      Gemma Purser answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Nope! Definatley not! Thats why you should always ask questions and challenge peoples findings until you are happy in yourself that you understand or have been shown enough evidence to accept (or not) what the theory that the scientist is putting forward. If we all just accepted what people found the first time they came up with an idea or theory then we would probably think that the earth was still flat! 🙂

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