In
science, certainty is elusive: What’s accepted as fact
is often reshaped or even displaced by new evidence that leads
to new theories. It’s common practice for scientists
to challenge each other’s research and interpretations
of it—a process known as "peer review." Ultimately,
this process serves to validate or invalidate the research
and the conclusions drawn from it.
While there are debates among them, scientists in every field
contribute to a body of collective knowledge. Often, people
in different scientific disciplines ask the same questions
in different ways. Their answers combine perspectives and
give us greater overall knowledge. For example, physicists
at CERN and astronomers at the Hubble Space Telescope are
both studying the origins of the universe. Hubble allows astronomers
to look at the very vast nature of the universe, with images
of light from shortly after the
Big Bang
.
These pictures help them think about
the age of the universe
and how it came into being. Meanwhile,
experiments at CERN probe
descriptions
of the Big Bang from a physics point of view
,
investigating the nature of the smallest of particles in the
search to understand how they were created. Together, the
two fields create a broader picture of how the universe came
into being.
The same is true in the world of biology. For hundreds of
years, evolutionary biologists have used visible characteristics
of living things as clues to how species have changed and
diverged through evolution. With
Watson
and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA
and
other researcher’s
inventions of ways to decode it
,
biologists can compare the genomes of organisms and better
understand how and where species have branched on
the
tree of life
.
Scientists can even
glean information about how life might arise on other planets
by studying the unique adaptations of bacteria and other organisms
that live in extreme conditions such as
the
Dry Valleys of Antarctica
.
The global process of science is a cumulative one; each discovery,
no matter what field it is in, informs many others. Progress
comes from researchers building on work done before them.
With each new answer, it seems, new questions arise. And with
them come new scientists who will pursue new knowledge and
theories, and inevitably toss out some of the old.
