Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Why Are Scientists Constantly Surprised By What They Discover?
Slashdot reader dryriver asks about "the sheer number of times scientists consider something to be 'scientifically impossible', are badly disproven by some kind of new finding or discovery a few years later, and then express 'surprise' that 'X is indeed possible'."
If you do a Google News search for the keywords "scientists were surprised" or similar, a huge number of science-related news articles contains a passage about "scientists being surprised" by what they discovered. There seems to be a great disparity between the mindset of inventors -- who always try to MAKE new things become possible -- and the mindset of many scientists, who seem unable or unwilling to consider that what "science holds to be true today" may not turn out to be quite so true tomorrow.
Here's the question: Why do many scientists, having knowledge of the fact that surprises in science happen all the time, continually express "surprise" when they find something unusual? If surprises in scientific research are so common, why are scientists still "surprised" by "surprise findings"?
"The surprising stuff is what we hear about, and there has to be some reason why it is surprising," argues gurps_npc in response to the original submission. "A common answer is that current state of science thinks the surprising stuff was impossible."
"The whole premise is flawed," counters long-time reader Martin+S. "Natural skepticism is an essential component of science." And long-time reader UnknownSoldier supplies a one-word answer: "Ego."
But how would you answer the question? Share your best thoughts in the comments. Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
Here's the question: Why do many scientists, having knowledge of the fact that surprises in science happen all the time, continually express "surprise" when they find something unusual? If surprises in scientific research are so common, why are scientists still "surprised" by "surprise findings"?
"The surprising stuff is what we hear about, and there has to be some reason why it is surprising," argues gurps_npc in response to the original submission. "A common answer is that current state of science thinks the surprising stuff was impossible."
"The whole premise is flawed," counters long-time reader Martin+S. "Natural skepticism is an essential component of science." And long-time reader UnknownSoldier supplies a one-word answer: "Ego."
But how would you answer the question? Share your best thoughts in the comments. Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
It is all PR
In many scientific fields, especially mathematics (which is of course not technically a science but that's not the point here so let's not argue about that), results are often not interesting unless they are "surprising". Hence the tendency to exxegerate things.
There are also the occasions when scientists are pessimistic about certain results, and when these turned out well, they become pleasantly surprised.
So are scientists lying when they say they are surprised? No, they are indeed surprised. However, the level of surprise is low. It's a figure of speech.
For us to be alarmed, we would have to be "shocked" and "in disbelief".
Being thorough on a subject makes you preoccupied. Especially if you're smart that way. Being thorough on the scientific method makes you discover things and are truly proven to be new. Which makes details you had the wrong assumptions about ever more surprising.
Also: calling a discovery surprising makes a report about it more interesting.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What causes confirmation bais? Ego. What causes religion? Ego. What causes the DK effect? Ego. What causes us to strive to break world records? Ego. The list goes on without any discernible limit. Making your response "Ego" completely meaningless trite.
What made you say it?
Ego.
... "surprisingly" discovering a common turn of phrase artifact in scientific papers, assumes significance... and runs with it into science-skeptic plausible whattaboutism for no discernible reason. News at 11.
You have an anti science dogma to build up and you're releasing to the blog press your propaganda that "it's all just PR" as if the reason why the ICE in your car works is just due to PR, why your computer works is all due to PR, why you are fed and clothed and housed in advanced materials produced by technology is all just PR.
PR is needed to let people know. Ever watch Fox news? That's, despite its definite intent to lie by omission and present opinion as fact, still a press; And their releases are press releases passed on to you. If it's all "just" PR, then the "just" is trying to make out PR is somehow meaningless. Yet how do you find anything out without one?
Maybe you don't. Where you get it from is prior bias and an echo chamber.
It's just a lazy journalistic cliche.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke's first law
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
When an inventor creates a new invention, they create something new that no one else has thought of before.
When a scientist makes a new discovery, they find that the current scientific consensus is incorrect.
Is it more surprising to find out current knowledge is wrong or to find out your the first person to think of an idea?
Apparently the former according to this article.
As a neuroscientist I can tell you why many scientists in the life sciences are surprised by findings: shocker! It's because living systems are so absurdly complicated. Just take a look at what is known currently for any major biochemical pathway, or gene regulation, or mitochondrial metabolism, or protein trafficking in the cell. The complexity is mind boggling. Anyone who thinks you can wade into that abyss of unknowns with certainty hasn't done any biological research.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
.. gets surprised - how else are you going to lead research and proof results? I mean only way there were no surprise were if you had preset results and you 'proved' them to be true every time. There are places and there were times, this was how science worked. I recalled reading that during the siege of Leningrad (took 3years and people were starving to death) the advice from soviet scientists have been modified to include reality instead of dogma as to provide people with home grown food the most efficient way possible. Seems the threat of millions dying is sometimes the only thing that helps. I think we should be happy if modern day scientists get surprised often instead of proving dogma is true? I wonder however if that is not being washed away by the sjw - after all if even particles can fight for justice as recent controversy surrounding Mr Strumia then the truth is not the goal anymore especially if it disturbs the prevailing mindset. Number of events on US campuses (and elsewhere in the West) where certain speakers have been refused entry or being shouted away by 'oppressed' shows me that the campus is not a place for open mind anymore. If that is so there how do we get 'surprising' results when the students become scientists?
Simple: funding. It's similar to how negative results get such a poor reception. Journals, funding agencies, tenure committees, don't want to hear "we didn't discover what we were hoping to find" and they're only slightly more receptive to "we discovered exactly what we expected". They like to hear "man! you'll be as surprised as we were when you hear what we found."
Please.
updated version of that day one movie? nothing really new in centuries? from chimps to chumps in just a few clicks? x # of days & the shyloks/minions reown our already shaky debt slave mortgages/vehicles? andy roid replacing us at bad typing? inability to calculate debt even unrelated to present flummox? hibernation not an option? tears in the sky (of all kinds) until the moms can finally stop crying over us? couch space at a premium? truth+mercy=justice, better days ahead..
next; will the real mr. tesla &/or his maliciously interrupted work (free energy for all) ever be acknowledged/applied? how far is walking distance? do we (previously us?) recycle, or start new every time? is it ok to ask the kids about the 'weather'? the 'clergy'? clowns? currency? where clones come from?
Scientific Surprise Meme. It has embedded into the culture of communication in the English speaking world at least so that even the scientists themselves have apparently started to repeat it. Meanwhile the same scientists may hold strong, speculative opinions on the expected results and discoveries. But perhaps that is where the surprise meme has gained its strength. Assumption is the mother of all surprises, as they might say somewhere.
Things going according to plan don't make for exciting news. Discoveries that were planned for don't make for exciting news. Only the unexpected gets attention. If you find something you were expecting anyway, then there is nothing to be excited about.
You could even cite Claude Shannon: Information is the inverse of probability. If the Improbable happens, you get much more information than from an event highly probable. Thus yes, important discoveries are often not expected.
Scientists are not surprised by nearly everything they see when they run an experiment. There are many many articles about how this or that confirms such and such earlier understanding. That is BORING! What is exciting is when they see something that does not behave they way they expect. When they are SURPRISED by the result of the experiment there is something new to discover! It may be only that the experiment was flawed in some way or that there really is something going on. That is exciting! Every scientist wants to be the one remembered for opening a new door into a deeper understanding of our world. As for inventions. Most great inventions start with a discovery. The words first spoken after a new invention is usually not Urica I have Found it! it is usually hmm that's odd??? The rest of the invention process is hard work figuring out how to get that odd result all the time and have it do something useful.
But how would you answer the question? Share your best thoughts in the comments. Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
Why would you care what we think? If you were a scientist you'd run a goddamn experiment and find the actual answer.
I believe it's a combination of being proud and thinking within a silo that every possible option has been exhausted. Often impossible is a term used to describe many unknowns such as scope and depth. When a researcher does a related work search it often only covers some of the categories and sometimes seemingly unrelated work results in changes that the original researcher could not see.
For further details on bad journalism, read http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
Because you're comparing a tiny percentage of apocryphal, paraphrased quotes using loose fluffy editorial subjective language to describe an objective process
Was this originally posted in the 'random dumb questions people ask at parties' topic ?
Or is it just the spin out by the reporters?
Are there scientific papers that exclaim the surprise?
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to primates that evolved for life on the savannahs of Africa.
It's rather amazing that natural laws are amenable to logic, mathematics, and thought experiments, and that scientists so often guess right.
In other words, this is the wrong question. The question should be "Why is the natural world predictable in such detail, and why are we getting it right more often than not?"
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Scientists aren't surprised. That's just the language that is used to describe findings that don't match up with existing dogma.
As another poster suggested, the natural world is exceedingly complex. Physics aside, our models of it tend to be simple. Simple models perforce do not capture complexity, and thus, are often wrong when you test them beyond their domain.
If you, as a scientist, aren't constantly stumbling across unexpected results (which are written as surprises, that term has a different meaning in scientific papers than in the general public), then you aren't exploring new areas. As a scientist, you work by taking an existing model or hypothesis, and pushing it to its limits, finding where it breaks down, and creating a new, better model that accommodates a wider area. There are precious few cases where such models are sufficiently complete that we have run out of things to test ... low-energy fundamental particle physics seems to be the best-known one. In biology, which is the field I work in, we aren't even remotely close.
Take paleontology, for instance. One a seemingly monthly basis, new dinosaur species are being discovered, or old bones are realized to have been put together wrong, or new details about extinctions have been discovered. For that field, much of the surprise comes from additional data sources -- our older, simpler models were based on less data, and with additional information, better models can be built. Dinosaurs, when I was a kid, were thought to all be lizard-like in appearance. Recent discoveries of exceedingly well-preserved specimens suggest many of them had feathers, and were colored.
Take planetary sciences / cosmology. We have discovered a vast trove of objects in our solar system, thanks to new streams of data. We have discovered large numbers of planets beyond our solar system, also thanks to new streams of data. The better we build our telescopes and sensors, the better a picture of the cosmos we get. Each increase in available resolution continues to bring surprises because we do not have fully-developed models of the universe.
Take geology. Plate tectonics was validated only about 50 years ago. We don't know for sure that the same thing happens on other planets.
And biology. The combination of Darwin, and Watson and Crick seemed to explain all of evolution. Except that, as we look more and more closely, there *are* acquired traits that are inherited ... they're just not the dominant means of evolution. Our tools are getting better and measuring with finer molecular detail, revealing secrets of the scaffolding around DNA and the immense role it plays in determining externally observable characteristics.
Or sleep. We actually understand much of the metabolic mechanism for sleep, now. There is a real rejuvenation process. But we wouldn't have understood that without new tools that allow us to probe at high temporal and spatial resolution, and with fine molecular resolution using genetic tools.
In short, scientists are surprised because we discover new things all the time. We remain on the cusp of wide troves of knowledge, all of which is new. Each new revolution in data collection brings with it a new, unexplored realm and, as is written in many papers, surprises.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
1. Most "discoveries" are of the form "we thought that was probably do-able but it turns out to be slightly easier / harder / more interesting / whatever than we thought". They don't make the news outside of the community.
2. When some big shake up happens and it is something less expected, it's much easier to write the news as "clever people baffled by something that you can think is obvious and then laugh at them being clever when think 'well duh'" than it is "new discovery illuminates an area most people, other than the team who chose to work on it, thought there was nothing to and it suggests that a minority opinion in the research community may have some weight but it would have been hard to find anyone who had ruled it out completely".
Full stop.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
It seems that newspaper reporters are adding their own twist to the story, and given that the reporter has never seen such advanced technology, the reporter gets supriced. But obviously on a science article, noone cares what the reporter thinks, so the surprise that reporter sees needs to be attributed to the scientist. That's why scientists are always surprised. It's a fraud and scam.
The entire question is malformed. Classic example of cherry picking bias.
Part of it is click-bait headlines. When do you ever see "scientists surprised" in a technical paper? Never.
But most of it is scale. You have millions of scientists around the world doing experiments across thousands of disciplines every day. Of course a few of them will make surprising discoveries. It would be shocking if no one ever discovered anything new.
The question sounds like major aspects of scientific knowledge are constantly being overturned. No. A surprising result here or there is the exception, not the rule. In most fields, you might have one or two really earth shattering discoveries a decade. And you have a few more a year that make you say "huh, I wouldn't have expected that" without any significant implications. Scientific knowledge isn't being completely overhauled every other month.
The status quo exists because it's generally been right for countless experiments across decades. Surprising results are memorable precisely because they are rare.
The "question" is nothing more than a reflection of scope and scale. Science does many things in many fields. Aggregate anything that large together and it will superficially seem like "ZOMG everything is changing all the time!". When all you're really doing is focusing on the outliers.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Why are programmers constantly surprised to find bugs in code they thought was working?
This is a perfect example of a slashdot story. Simple, honest question is asked, experts provide reasonable explanations, non-experts provide snark, cynicism, and failed attempts at humor, and ignore the expert explanations.
This makes a pretty good case for using this site as a clipping service and pretending the comments don't exist.
"Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?"
By definition, if you discover something, it is surprising. This is seriously how low slashdot has fallen? Accepting questions that make it obvious that the poster doesn't understand the language? So sad, so fucking sad.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bias
...with science. Eastern Dharmic religions, not so much.
Because "scientists were surprised" is click bait.
If you find exactly what you expected, you don't feel the need to even mention that. The only exception is experimental findings that confirm Relativity exactly as expected - because mentioning that is what is expected (by the public mostly) for traditional reasons.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Heck, it scientists don't find what they expected, some fudge the numbers to get the desired results - and then don't mention what they had expected not to raise suspicion of their behavior.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I studied some of the mechanical and contractile properties of smooth muscle. In spite of vast morphological differences between smooth muscle and striated (skeletal) muscle, smooth muscle demonstrated qualitatively similar results as striated muscle. https://www.pnas.org/content/7.... The surprise here is that form and function do not necessarily follow each other.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
As well as the point about sensationalist journalism (as plenty of others have already pointed out), current estimates are that there are 2.5 million scientific papers published each year (http://blog.cdnsciencepub.com/21st-century-science-overload/). Obviously, only an incredibly small fraction of those get any coverage in the wider media - the vast majority of research that gets done is the "long tail" of work that is generally rather dull and unremarkable.
We totally expected that there would be comets that broke the speed of light so we weren't even looking for them when we *Yawn* found one while looking for the planet Cybertron.
... it's engineering.
This is the stupidest slashdot story ever. Naturally if you google "scientists are suprised" then 100% of the articles will be about specific scientists being surprised by something.
This doesn't in fact prove that scientists in general are "often surprised" any more than googling "gay scientists" and finding that 100% of the articles you find just happen to be about gay scientists proves that scientists are usually gay.
That's because you have a lot of experience with what is normal and abnormal in this world, enough to understand how surprising a unicorn on Main Street is. But there is nothing impossible about the anatomy of a unicorn; indeed nothing particularly implausible. If you *read* about a unicorn cantering down Main Street in a fantasy novel, you wouldn't be particularly shocked, unless the author was amazingly good.
When you are a toddler, an unusually small or large dog on Main Street is a wonder. Most people, when it comes to science, are as unacquainted as a small child when it comes to basic science facts, much less more arcane ones. A study of college students and their science knowledge some years ago revealed that a large number of them believed the Moon had no gravity. When asked how the astronauts stayed on the surface of the Moon, the most common answer was "heavy boots". So these people would not be surprised at all if an astronaut stepped out of his spacecraft and floated away because his boots weren't heavy enough.
Finally, only a fool believes that inventors accomplish the *impossible*. At best, what an inventor achieves is the implausible. Most often what they achieve is the plausible but economically unfeasible. Now it may be that some day in the future an inventor will create something which most scientists now believe to be impossible. Most people won't be particularly surprised if someone invented a material that shields you from gravity, or faster than light travel. That's because they're *ignorant*.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They aren't. Common people are constantly surprised by everything because they are only barely aware of their surroundings. These buffoons have resources that must be extracted and you have to compete with mouth breathing Twitch streamers somehow.
Itâ(TM)s just a cool phrase to pique user interest.
First, there's the search term itself. it contains the clause that the OP is trying to prove. So that is circular logic. Try actually being "scientific" about it and google just "scientist" and see how big that set is vs "scientists" + "surprised", so we can can get some sort of estimate of the proportion of news articles mentioning scientists who also happen to be surprised by something. Perhaps it's only 0.0001% of articles about scientists.
Secondly, scientists discover unsurprising results every day, far more than the surprising ones. Those just aren't newsworthy and/or don't get turned into further research projects. Which journalist is going to go write articles about the unsurprising facts?
For examples of cherry picking see apologists, climate deniers and flat earthers. Ever wonder why they don't make predictions, only decry as "false" the predictions of "standard science" and that on the rare occasions they DO, they turn out to be wrong? It's because they cherry pick the bits that "prove" their case, but if you use the biased data sample, your predictions FROM that sample will be biased and therefore wrong.
"the sheer number of times scientists consider something to be 'scientifically impossible', are badly disproven by some kind of new finding or discovery a few years later, and then express 'surprise' that 'X is indeed possible"
Name three such times.
I can't think, off the top of my head, of a reputable scientist who a) said something was impossible that b) was speaking for the community as a whole where c) it was then proven to be possible, and c) they were then surprised that it was possible.
Maybe over 50-100 years (i.e it's impossible "with current science", but overall?).
Even things like cold fusion (which we suspect to be impossible) is stated as being "unlikely", "improbable", etc. rather than concretely impossible.
There are extremely few absolutes in the scientific world, and they are the most-open-minded group of people (don't confuse this with the naivety of being "open-minded" about psychic phenomena, etc.... those kinds of things are stated to be as close to impossible as they can be, and proven by double-blind trials which prove they are nonsense).
And there's also a problem of interpretation. It's *not possible* for information to travel faster than the speed of light in any of the current scientific models, for instance. But we not only know that they are possibly incomplete or inaccurate, but that people mis-state, mis-interpret, and mis-understand quite what it is that the scientists say is impossible.
You get idiots - like the E-Cat guy - who claim to be scientists, may even have some qualifications, but come up with nonsense that's absolutely 100% bullshit and roundly condemned by the rest of the community. But that's like having the vegan nutter interviewed on the news somehow "representing" all the vegans in the world, or similar.
Scientists are rarely surprised, though it is fascinating when something unexpected happens (that doesn't mean we ever thought it was "impossible", just that we hadn't imagined that it was possible... which is very different*).
Really, it's just the reporting that's the hyperbolic thing. Scientists don't write press releases like that.
(* if you told a scientist from the 1800s that we'd all be driving computer-controlled electric cars, he wouldn't have said it was *impossible*. He just may not have imagined that it would be so well harnessed, prevalent, and considered mainstream, and that we had managed to store enough energy, control it with energy itself, etc. Impossible is a big word)
While that's true, there's a difference between the science community and individual scientists. As humans we tend to get stuck in our ways, you can tell how many great changes are not truly over until that generation is dead and buried. If you're an expert it's even harder to get over the fact that your expertise is wrong, we have our known unknowns but many things we think we've figured out completely. So while journalists obviously pick the juiciest headlines, I'm not surprised there are scientists that are in fact blindsided and baffled when it turns out their knowledge in a particular area was in fact incomplete or incorrect.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I work in the field of meteorology and oceanography, and did a thesis in numerical weather prediction.
Scientists in the field feel they have a pretty good understanding of the physics involved, and have come up with many models to predict the future states of the atmosphere and ocean.
None of the models are perfect, and almost all lose skill as forecasts are made further into the future. Incremental improvements are always being made, and none appear to be the "magic bullet be-all end-all" solution. Many "improvements" fall apart when extended to different spatial and time scales. So there's always surprise, and then an effort to understand what other parts of the model needs improvement.
In the real world (not the make believe world of science fiction) when something is said to be impossible it almost always turns out to be impossible.
They didn't act surprised about the Higgs boson, because it was hot enough on its own.
No, we were not surprised because it had been predicted as a solution in 1964. Then we built a massive collider and two huge experiments specifically to search for it. Anyone who expressed surprise at finding it in 2012 would have to have been an idiot.
Indeed the vast majority of recent surprises in particle physics have been exactly the opposite to what the article suggests. In our case, the surprises have generally turned out to be someone making a serious error. For example, the claim of a faster than light neutrino surprised everyone because it violated relativity. The eventual result was that it was caused by a cable that was not properly plugged in, which was a result that surprised nobody.
A similar thing happened a few years ago at the LHC where both experiments started to see signs of a surprising new resonance. However, as more data were collected the significance declined and it appears that it was just a statistical fluke. So in my experience surprising results are usually the ones that turn out to be wrong which is what you expect when you have a good understanding of what you are studying.
If you have lots of surprising results which turn out to be right then you clearly have a very poor understanding of whatever you are studying because the predictions of your theoretical model are constantly being proved wrong.
Looking at the news* on CNN.com today, I see that about 85% of people are politicians, and almost all are doing something crazy today.
Or maybe it's called NEWs because it's something NEW, something at least somewhat unexpected.
Neither the popular press nor the science news reported "the sun rose today - in the morning!", precisely because that's not surprising. "Guy goes to work, does his job, and gets a paycheck" isn't surprising - and therefore you don't hear about it. "Boss gives every employee a $20,000 bonus" is new(s), it's surprising, and therefore you hear about it.
* Whether what CNN reports is actual news vs propaganda is a different discussion.
Also there is a tendency of journalism to report on the surprise of the general public when the scientists had an expectation of the event. For example, the Higgs boson particle was found by CERN but it was predicted more than 50 years ago.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
To get a permanent position in academia, you need a lot of high-profile publications. But high-profile publications only publish "surprising" results (or "novel" results, as they would call it).
Therefore, if you come up with an idea that has a high chance of producing "surprising" results, you drop everything and pursue it. If you come up with an idea that has a low chance of producing "surprising" results, you save it for a rainy day.
To some extent, this can be a good thing. But in my experience, my papers that had the most potential for being useful have been rejected from the high-profile journals. Sometimes the rejection is not even based on the results themselves, but on the method you used not being novel enough. On the other hand, my papers that I'd classify as most "surprising" but also completely useless, were accepted in the same journals.
So as an insider, I'm kind of disillusioned by the system, which in my opinion focuses too much on novelty alone. (Which is why I'm switching to more applied research after my postdoc.)
In many of the articles I read where the researchers express surprise at their findings, it is because they expected another result. Not because they thought the discovery was impossible.
They were surprised, but that's part of science. Constantly discovering new things:
Hypothesize, test, use results to form new hypothesis. Repeat.
As a physical scientist, I too was often surprised by the results of my experiments. In one case, the data ran completely contrary to theory. The take-away here is that theory is very often proven wrong by experiment, thus the surprise.
This is a click bait question. Says something ludicrous as if it were true to get a rise out of people.
Just because scientists looking at something were surprised does not mean they thought it was impossible. It just means they learned something unexpected. Even in cases where they learned they were wrong about something does not mean they thought the alternative was 'impossible', more often than not the 'right' answer is well within the space of the possible, they just thought something else was the case.
...how dumb you people all are.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not âoeEureka!â (I found it!) but âoeThatâ(TM)s funny â¦â
â" Isaac Asimov
Surprise is a way to express the discovery of something unexpected-- the premise, all scientists by virtue of understanding a constantly changing world should, "expect the unexpected," is silly. Scientists are people and have emotional responses to unexpected events.
Most science is methodical and incremental, but it is also often surprising and monumental. Most nobel prize winners were just following their passion. It was a surprise for many, to discover how important their work was to the rest of the world.
Having read and written a good number of academic research papers, I've found that being "surprised" is part of the writing style. A paper can come across as stronger if there are surprising findings. In reality, most researchers aren't really all that surprised. Their instinct and intuition led them in the direction of the given research in the first place. Sometimes there are indeed surprising findings, but equally as often the authors find an interesting result in their work and claim to have been surprised.
The true story is "Scientists explained an interesting phenomenon in greater detail than before. They seemed excited about this. However, I failed to grasp the essence of what was important about it".
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I am a scientist. I essentially agree with the post that said âoeitâ(TM)s not the scientists who are surprised but the reportersâoe, but on reflection I realized that there is an aspect of surprise in the wider scientific community vs the scientists conducting the research themselves that can be genuine. i think the practice is somewhat incidental and not of any nefarious intent. The practice is not specifically to get grants but to write an interesting story, and it may have more to do with science writers than scientists. The proof of it unfortunately requires access to the scientific literature, but if you search for âoesurprisingâ in Google Scholar, that word is unlikely to appear very often â" much less is it likely to appear in the scientific article itself that corresponds to a press release that includes the word âoesurprisingâ. The reason is because those of us who write scientific articles wouldnt describe our results as surprising (most of the time), but those who turn our research results into narratives for press releases do â" possibly as a gimmick, or possibly because the way we explain it to them emphasizes different possible outcomes that could have been possible, and that âoesome peopleâ might have expected it to go a different way. Another reason it gets translated as surprise may be just related to how convoluted some scientific decision-making can get it, as a result of trying one thing, having it not work but noticing something âoestrangeâ, following up on that strange thing, and realizing that what seemed like an outlier ended up being related to something very specific and reproducible that no one previously knew about. Again, surprising at some level, but not at a low level to the scientist â" eg a scientist probably felt surprise at the first result with âoestrangeâ findings, but having followed it up to its logical conclusion, confirmation that something systematically strange is going on in a reproducible way that suggests a real phenomenon is no longer surprising bc at this point the scientist probably had a hunch he or she was on to something, or else he or she wouldnt have been pursuing those additional experiments â" and yet that is probably the result that a science writer would call surprising. I think the reason is partly related to the need to construct a narrative but often the âoesurpriseâ really does capture the reaction of other scientists not directly involved with the work. Eg, the reaction to any âoescientifically unexpectedâ result that in theory was possible but perhaps had never been tested and a random sample of scientists might be mixed on what the expected outcome should be, or might actually have predicted the opposite. If a portion of the scientific community could find your result unexpected, then the press release will usually get written up as saying that we ourselves were surprised. It is a âoecollectiveâ or a figurative surprise, that gets used maybe as a way to acknowledge to the readers that from a 30,000 foot view of established science prior to the investigations in question, the results would be surprising, and we are taking a step back from the results to join them there.
I give you an example. Lets say you have a project that has 365 developers. Assuming they all work every day and all of them are so skilled that they make only single build breaking mistake per year. If we assume that they never make the mistake during the same day, it means that the build will be broken every single day of the year.
I repeat, individuals are so skilled that they break the build only once per year, but because there are so many of them, it would seem to the outsider that the build is always broken so they must be very unskilled.
Same goes with the scientists. We have so many of them.
I dont know why the formatting turned out bad. No no one will read it without paragraphs haha ðY
The Scientific Method is somewhat to blame. The premise is that everything is false until proven to be true, and to go there one must provide a theory and then prove it. This requires that you think of a theory first and propose it. This alone means that you have to think of an answer to a question. By definition if your tests result in something other than you expect, you are already surprised. Then the whole scientific method is pessimistic. Take Bigfoot. whether one believes in Bigfoot or not, Bigfoot is assumed to not exist unless a scientist sees him digging through his trashcan, and most of the suppositions assume him to be an 'animal' of limited intelligence. Why do we not find bones or bodies? Suppose Bigfoot has death rituals as humans do? ... not accounted for. Why haven't we found him? Did we ever find D.B. Cooper? Maybe Bigfoot is smart enough to evade human contact. I propose that the scientific method has a flaw. It should become optimistic at some point. If there are hundreds of Bigfoot sightings in a year, as some of the researchers claim, then it becomes unlikely that all are hoaxes or misidentification, so maybe the scientific method should then assume that Bigfoot is likely to exist and is undetectable for some reason. At this point scientists would be less surprised when we finally find real evidence, when, as Jane Goodall did with the great ape, someone finds an encampment someday.
I am not a scientist, and maybe I am oversimplifying it, but I find scientific studies frustrating when I read that everything is always dismissed out of hand until an apple falls from a tree and hits them on the head.
I suggest that they aren't actually "surprised," but that they have learned how to present things to the public in a way that draws attention and interest - like the "caused jaws to drop" click bait thing.
E Proelio Veritas.
Pretty much anything mankind has ever 'known' has eventually turned out to be incorrect.
It shouldn't surprise anyone when something is disproven.
I have no idea what your fucking point is.
My senior advisor who passed away 20 years ago taught us that true scientific discovery happens and is recognized when you make it sound so obvious that everybody is astonished: "how on earth we did not see this before?".
What was astonishing in early history of science was the mesmerizing simplistic beauty of new: epicycles were tedious, boring, repetitive, ad hoccerish (adhoccer.adhockey player - you heard that here first), while Kepler's laws were weeping-inducing elegant and aesthetically pleasing.
Nowadays it's the opposite: take the protein structure prediction: we started with simple and beautiful ab initio models on every level of prediction and ended up with epicycles of HMMs.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It's highly conservative, careers are incredibly difficult to build and maintain, and the individuals in them have a strong vested interest in maintaining the veneer of their own expertise.
Young academics with bright ideas either become old academics that preach The Church of What is Already Taken for Granted or are selected out of the industry. And if they make it and become elders of The Church of What is Already Taken for Granted, their continued influence depends on others worshipping at the altars of The Church of What is Already Taken for Granted.
The grants and fellowships, the awards and research dollars, the accolades and key positions on conference panels—all go to people who pursue the minutia of the already well understood. The people who threaten to show us something really new—who threaten to undermine the hard-won careers of dozens of academics from dozens of schools at any conference? They are, unsurprisingly, universally condemned as crackpots. Even by people that haven't bothered to read a single page of their publication record.
Science is meant to be conservative, but in its current state, the social and economic incentives at play have largely broken it.
My girlfriend's answer was that if you do a bunch of tests and repeatedly get negative or boring results, then when something new happens you're surprised.
My answer is that it's media, and that scientists want to sound surprised so that they continue to get funding. Same reason you keep seeing the word "slammed"in politics all the time now: media spin. Media wants attention.
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I think many times scientists stumble onto discoveries instead of actually looking for certain ones.
A lot of the "discoveries" that are "surprising" are ones that can't be dis proven. Like climate change and anything found in outer-space. Can't prove either and you can't disprove either.
Then there are plenty of things that some scientists write about but turns out to be wrong, or fake years later. Like multiple personality disorder, it was based on 1 case and many years later the doctor and patient admitted they made it all up.
Also there is a tendency of journalism to report on the surprise of the general public when the scientists had an expectation of the event. For example, the Higgs boson particle was found by CERN but it was predicted more than 50 years ago.
And Scientists are surprised, shocked, and baffled that it took so long.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
To be a scientist you need to be curious about the unknown or unexplained.
Once you can formulate a new approach and explain an answer to these questions you become a successful scientist.
Even for yourself but especially for the laymen the explanation might look surprising, who cares, you found the solution.
And very likely a new question has now arisen.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
This whole submission strains to avoid any examples of what it's talking about. Maybe if you could be a little more specific than asking us all to search for different things and attempt to find some case of "scientifically impossible." Did someone travel faster than light or something like that, and I just missed it? That would be a good case to talk about, if that's what you mean. Or was it something else?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Are you five, poster? They typically aren't, unless they are millennials and have never bothered to study or do research in the way that millennials don't. Get out of the echo chamber.
The Scientests aren't actually surprised It's the Reporters writing the news stories that are surprised
No, scientists do not operate in absolute certainty of what they will discover, they are regularly surprised by what they discover. It is the religionists who have absolute certainty because they are the only ones I have met that claim they can explain everything in the universe, ... with a collection of ancient religious texts and the fickle opinions of their clergy.
... surprised are not learning a goddam thing.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Mystery Red of the Great American Eclipse
It has blood on it!
ABCNews: Eclipse makes pendulum wander
Lunar Eclipse this Sunday evening. Is that red shadow light always there, or does it fade in as NatGeo and WashPost show?
Nat Geo Eclipse 101
Some scientists actually have a passion for science, some love it, some like it.
To have their whole world turned upside down, to be surprised many times, that is reason enough for some.
It's nothing magical. It's just rare.
(Find your passion, follow it!)
Is it possible that scientists are so surprised so often of the time because "surprised" make a better headline? Look at the overuse of "surprised", "shocked" and "couldn't believe what they saw" in the last few years in all types of news.
The news industry makes money by selling content or selling advertising when you view the content. There's a perception (probably true) that "shocked at what they found" "scientists surprised" "discovered the impossible" and such hyperbole gets fingers on buttons or (much less now) pocket change in newspaper machines.
What scientists actually feel, is, I STRONGLY suspect, a lot more boring.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Most of those experiments that cause surprise? Nope. They do the experiment because their guess (hypothesis) says the result may actually happen. They have an idea already (a theory) about what could happen, they do an experiment, and find out of their guess was correct.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I am one of those scientists who are "surprised" at one of our
discoveries, in this case the coupling between dark matter and baryons.
"Surprise" is obtained due to the fact that all previous work on
dark matter indicated that it is something different from regular
matter (atoms, i.e., baryons). It does not emit EM, it does not
respond to strong or weak forces, only gravity.
Thus our discovery (by the SPARC team) that dark matter and
baryons follow a very tight relationship is in sharp contrast with the
expectations from previous work.
This kind of "surprise" hints at new physics, which is why science
types are very excited when surprised.
One wonders how many scientists were "surprised" only in news articles...
How much of this "surprise" is down to newspapers trying to sell the story?
Often, unsurprising findings are published, or previous results are confirmed. And then, people make comments like, "What? They needed a grant from the NSF to figure that out? I could have told you that!" There's no winning with some people.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
...and what they did next will amaze you!
Beware of the Leopard.
Who do so many people, having knowledge of the fact that suprises happen in health all the time, continually express "surprise" when they find that they have cancer?
Why do so many people, having knowledge of the fact that robberies happen all the time, continually express "surpise" when they get robbed.
When something happens to someone, something or some topic you care about, this makes a lot more impact than when it happens to the population in general. The universe won't care if an asteroid wipes out humanity, but for the humans it would be pretty surprising if it happened tomorrow.
I like to remember that most significant scientific finds never start with, "Eureka! I have found it!" but more, "That's odd."
Journalists are just incompetent buffoons who don't know how to do anything but write click-bait article for dip-shits to have meaningless debates about.
This is just scientists being honest. What they 'discover' are things that are far less than obvious to the casual observer and may have long been presumed to be a thing it is not. That is the nature of science, always making theories then experimenting and adjusting the body of lore as it grows and discovers new things.
Because they all think everything they think they know is proven and true. They've forgotten the scientific method and that theories are still just *theories* and are still subject to become disproved or be demonstrated incomplete in some way. Ideas that they don't like or go against a theory they have accepted are considered "impossible", because that way they feel better about being "right" about the theories they have adopted.
It's now no different than religion.
This sounds awfully like a stupid person's idea of a smart question, so that you've got your foot in the door to to next ask "Why don't materialist scienticians say jesus did everything?"
Science is about exploring the frontier of knowledge. On the frontier, no one knows what to expect, so almost anything can be surprising. In contrast, engineers (and inventors) are all about turning knowledge into usable products. There's less surprise there because the basic science is already worked out.
Is it the researchers, or is it the journalists who are reporting on the science?
Not even that. Scientists have long known the difficulty of detecting such a heavy particle. The wait was all about building an accelerator big enough and sensors fast enough to detect it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"...the feeling when something happens that you didn't expect."
It's not necessarily shock they're feeling. It could simply be "oh, huh, i didn't expect that result."
Which happens quite often when you science.
Most science follows the pattern of âoecurrent knowledge suggests the next step in furthering that knowledge which, after some testing, is proven to be likely correctâ which is solid and useful and not exciting enough to be widely reported. But when following the path of knowledge takes an unexpected turn, then the news is all over it. Thereâ(TM)s nothing wrong with this, but it has to be expected, acknowledged, and accounted for. Donâ(TM)t judge the state of scientific advancement solely by headlinesâ"youâ(TM)ll only be getting a sliver of the truth.
As a researcher who has made and published "surprising" discovery of a new class of solution to a longstanding problem, my surprise came mostly from knowing that some really smart people have worked on my problem for decades, and they did not find it. I think that understanding of numerical methods led me to approach the problem from a standpoint that they would/could not. Maybe not so surprising then, but invigorating to know that for a time, you are the only person on Earth that knows a certain thing.
We can't prove that there wasn't a shadowy actor who made slight nudges to evolution over the course of billions of years to lead amino acids to humanity.
In other words, we cannot yet disprove theistic evolution.
Personally, I have nothing against you if you want to believe in a god who made really tiny nudges like that, good on you
Nor do I.
but that's not the god most religious people appear to believe in.
Many Christian denominations, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, accept the scientific consensus that Earth is billions of years old. Old Earthers since Saint Augustine in the fifth century have reconciled this with the creation week of Genesis 1 using a day-age theory, citing other scripture to justify interpreting a "day" of creation as a metaphor for an arbitrarily long era. Some day-agers accept evolution in a theistic form; others, the progressive creationists, posit created families within which God has allowed microevolution to happen.
Now as for "most", I'm curious about the fraction of believers who belong to old-Earth denominations, young-Earth denominations, or denominations that take no position on Earth's age. The Roman Catholic Church falls into the last category.
Headlines that say "New finding shocks scientists" are almost always clickbait written by reporters who don't know what they're talking about. Scientists are rarely very surprised by their results. You don't know in advance what the result will be, but it usually is somewhere in the range where you thought it might be. Truly surprising results are rare. But when they do happen, they of course get a lot of press.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
It's the reporters who keep talking about how scientists are surprised and it'll change everything. The scientists are just happy to have discovered anything and adds to current knowledge.
Scientists often find surprising things because that's where they focus their research. They're trying to learn about the world, and unpredicted results give you more information (teach you more) about the world than boring predictable ones.
So scientists look for things which have not been explored or tested before and which they have a hunch might turn up something interesting.
This is correct and proper allocation of research resources.
Then comes the second question: they hoped and suspected they might find something novel before they started. So why call themselves "surpised"?
Here are two reporting biases. One is simply that the enormous stream of unsurprising results passes by without notice. Someone does a PhD on a previously unstudied subject, finds out previous theories describe things perfectly, and it disappears into the back of the library unread by anyone outside the thesis committee.
Second is the nature of press officers. Someone has found out something interesting enough to warrant a press release, and the University press office tries to make it sound as exciting as possible. "What's interesting about this? Why should anyone care?" Thus, the wording you note. It's not false, just slanted to sound as dramatic as possible.
They haven't accepted it's literally impossible to imagine anything that is itself impossible.
When a scientist spends years conducting an experiment and gets results which support his/her hypothesis it is a scientific success, but it's not news. Have you ever seen a headline in the regular media saying "Scientist gets expected results"?
When a scientist conducts an experiment and gets results which don't confirm expectations, it's news, but only if the journalist gives it the headline "Scientists surprised". Note that it can also be a scientific success (if the experiment was well constructed) but that's not the news.
After publishing an interesting scientific result, I was interviewed by a number of media outlets.
What was most surprising was their take on my results miced with not a small amount of sensationalism. In their words, I was shocked and surprised by the result, when I clearly wasnâ(TM)t so.
I think a large proportion of subjective remarks of this type in pop-sci publishing is generated by journalists, not scientists; and this is a bunk article and topic.
This, too, is largely a myth that should be carefully examined.
Suppose string theory hadn't been a crock for working physicists (as opposed to chalk artists). What would Richard Feynman have done next?
First of all, mathematics is notoriously a young man's game (as far ahead of her times as Ada Lovelace managed to be, she was no Srinivasa Ramanujan).
I've been trying to model this in terms of distributed represention. Perhaps at a younger age, your brain has the signal to noise ratio required to maintain a larger concurrent vector representation of your analytic quagmire, and all its fizzled leads, dead ends, and hardships. Gradient is important in artificial neural networks. Perhaps the extended mental vector of youth can "see" gradient that a curtailed mental vector can not (modulo the underlying formalisms you suckled from the womb). One part of this is to have full command of the formal idioms required to capture your inspiration in hard currency. Feynman still had those in spades to the end of his days.
But what to use them for? The novel approach—the wobbling plate in its fully hyper-dimensional glory—was no longer arriving courtesy of the long view of youth.
I don't think an aging Feynman would have had any special trouble navigating the formalisms of string theory—had it actually made testable predictions in this lifetime. But I don't think an aging Feynman could have done creative work there. By no means would this have anything to do with Feynman being a stick in the mud, unable to accept a radically changed physical paradigm. But the problem is that his creative circuits would have still been welded to the displaced currency of his mathematical prime (ages 19 and 23). Furthermore, QED would not have suddenly lighted up a giant red FAIL klaxon for the hearing impaired. One can still do a lot with QED, even without it being the last word.
So now let's bring in an economist for the standard lecture on comparative advantage and marginal opportunity.
Mastering QED is not without peril for the second rate. Much remains to police in the maintenance of this impressive intellectual edifice (even after the shine is taken off by a superior deep theory).
In software, we somehow grudgingly accept that maintenance happens. But then we're too stupid to imagine that any form of maintenance ever existed in any other profession before our own. NIH syndrome, they name is hubris.
Most theories that ever made any scientist famous delivered a lot of value to society in their time and place. Just because the next hot theory comes along, that doesn't mean the previous paradigm has finished pushing its last ever maintenance branch.
Man, those scientists, too intellectually leaden to abandon the failed model of maintaining multiple releases concurrently.
You see, unlike software, ideas in the physical sciences have no inherent metabolism: the better idea would flash across space and time without so much apparatus as a carrier particle, were it not for the hidebound gargoyles of past eminence.
There are, of course, many fine examples of churlish egotism.
Heroes of Science: Michael Faraday — 27 July 2016
"scientists" have always been agenda driven. they want to push a liberal agenda because they know it gives the most illegally stolen tax dollars into there back pockets. fake bullshit stuff like evolution, global warming, "particle colliders", the "big bang" theory, etc, are all driven by agenda of getting the most money from hard working taxpayers to fund scienctists extravagent lifestiles.
They are pretty damn rare, and often taken out of context (like the quote about airplane not being possible - it was about directed flight within the known engineering - dumb but not as dumb as saying flight in general was impossible - just look at birds). I have not seen many of them , usually it is down to claim not being shored up by evidence, but when that DO happens much later to have evidence, then they are recognized. e.g. plate tectonic or giant wave. But even those case are pretty damn rare, and scientist are willing to examine what goes against the old knowledge. If they did not we would still be back to 17th century knowledge. Who do you think threw everything and wanted answers ? The scientist of the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st century ! Nobody else !
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"scientist X does his job and advanced knowledge a little bit" is unsexy. "scientist is surprised by X" "scientist says X is impossible to be later proven wrong" all are headline which sell 1000 more than the first. As a general rule all fellow scientist I ever worked with WANTED to be surprised, to write their name somewhere, in posterity, to find the new laws, new particle, new material or anything new, the dream of the average scientist is not to go to an event less day at work, or be proven correct in the actual existing knowledge. No the dream is to find something new breaking the old knowledge down and potentially maybe a nobel.
The only one with the "scientist don't like to go agaisnt dogma" or using the "old scientist being proven wrong" are people having NEVER met a scientist : the SAME people endorsing the film/tv serie caricature of a scientist (you know , the first guy being killed by a demon or meeting an angel, or the first guy killed by the monster he said was not existing, you know the trope) and projecting their own unwillingness to face toward the unknown. They think this is what scientist do, because this is what they would do (and in the case of people projecting CT often already do).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Scientist try not to speculate on things that aren't supported by current data and models, so when something unexpected happens, they are obviously surprised.
They aren't shocked, yelling Eureka, having their entire worldviews damaged, or any of the other hysteria that media seems to want you to think happened.
They also try to damp down assumptions that aren't based in facts so they certainly don't expect unicorns and rainbow-poop, leave that for the wackjobs and conmen. Scientists intentionally limit themselves to expecting what is known, so if something outside that range happens, it's a surprise.
They're just surprised. Like when you walk into the kitchen and your wife is there, but you thought she went to the store 10 minutes ago. It's not a big deal.
When it comes to scientist, the first thing they like to do when surprised in scientific experiments is to try and verify that they didn't screw it up!
Also to make sure that there is no failure of the equipment.
Then they throw it out for their colleagues to figure out where they screwed up since they can't seem to find it yet.
This is around the point where they start getting excited, because if it's shown they didn't screw up, they've found something unexpected, and for scientists, that is exciting! Something like that can overturn old science, or even open up entirely new branches of science. THIS is what they live for!
There's nothing sinister, stupid, ignorant, or even egotistical about this at all. The fact that apparently some people seem to think it is just shows that there are people out there that don't understand how the scientific principle and research actually works. They've also probably been influenced by 'reporters' that hype up and distort all this stuff. Those people rarely understand what's being discussed, and they just want to hype reactions for the public, so they make a big deal out of it without even understanding it.
So the next time you see an article exclaiming that scientists are shocked or surprised at some new thing, just hit the actual science sites and see if the scientists are actually talking about it a lot, or if they're just giving it a luke warm reception, if they're even discussing it at all.
In other words, stop listening to the chicken little with the microphone, and look to the responsible adults actually working on the situation.
That was funny, thanks.
real truth comes from the bible, not liberal agenda science
Scientists are often wrong, while science is never wrong. So scientists are either surprised they're right or they're completely wrong and surprised by what they find.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Spot on.
Discover (verb) find (something or someone) unexpectedly or in the course of a search.
The majority of surprising discoveries fall into two categories:
. A contradiction of previously held notions,
. Unanticipated finding
It's largely the lottery phenomenon: "There's 10^6 dollars behind one of these doors" "Number 2" *cheers* But you knew the prize was there, you knew it was behind 1/3 doors, so why does *anyone* have a reaction to the correct selection?
Powered heavier-than-air flight was a "discovery" when we simply stopped doing it the wrong way.
Black holes would test the validity of many models, but nobody knew for sure if they really existed. Across those camps were different camps that varied on whether a black hole would be detectable. We were "surprised" at the ways we were able to discover black holes, not for the result but for the pass-on implications of the methods used and the models tested.
Exoplanets: The presence of accumulated rock or gas around a distant star... Literally: "Look, more rock/gas!"
Generally, we "discover" them by looking at where we think they will be, often clued in by previous data: "There's something behind this single door, or there isn't".
The gas, dust and rock themselves are completely tedious, but the implications of them being present in the necessary combination in the right orbit around a good star close enough to ourselves has the *potential* to provide opportunities for further investigation, and it's against the odds by more than 1/3.
In this way, they are "discoveries" the way any piece of land that someone intentionally traveled to was a "discovery" - Africa, India, America... There were people already living there, but it was still a discovery to those who confirmed that the place they'd been told was there ... was there.
So if you are testing some random property of bricks that involves your throwing them, and you record the right values of data, you could easily "discover" that bricks do in-fact experience some degree of lift as they fall, but that their other properties are more than enough to defeat it, and so they don't fly very well.
But it's not going to make the press unless you have some previously unknown or novel extra revelation, insight or finding that comes with that piece of "news".
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
> If you do a Google News search for the keywords "scientists were surprised..."
Injecting irony into a story makes the story more stimulating. Are you samping scientists, or are you sampling people who need to sell stimulating stories over and over?
No, scientists aren't getting constantly "surprised" or even "baffled". These are words journalists are putting in their mouths as a way of making a story more interesting.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
First and most importantly, I wouldn't be such a moron as to use news accounts to establish the extent to which a scientist or a group of scientists did or did not have a particular emotional response to some test results (by test results I mean either the data/observation or (and) the analysis or (and) the conclusion). As a first approximation, I would need to watch and listen to a video of the interview to make sure 1. the interviewee isn't being quoted out of context and 2. that the interviewee actually expressed sincere surprise and 3. the interviewee has good reason (i.e. is skilled in the relevant art) to have a contrary expectation. Obviously, if the scientist interviewed is NOT a member of the 'discovery' team, then we should assume that any expression of "surprise" has been cherry-picked by the media. There are, for example, still some scientists studying various aspects of Global Climate Change who believe that the current surface warming is not being driven by anthropogenic CO2. Some of them actually are respected in their niche. One vital element of the scientific method is being critical of and questioning all beliefs and conclusions. None of us live forever, so we all have to (tentatively, at least) accept some things based on authority and precedent. But there is no "holy scripture" which mandates which things we must accept and which it's ok to be skeptical and/or critical of. So, diversity of opinion is not only healthy, it is necessary. One last thing: when I read about an experiment like LIGO, I can be surprised by a number of aspects of it without having ANY criticism or suspicion of the conclusions: I can be surprised by it's clarity, elegance, its beauty, or even its utility or scope. IOW, a scientist expressing "surprise" at a particular paper (or even some conclusion therein) doesn't tell us enough about what s/he encountered that was unexpected. I'm totally ignorant of the technology behind the LIGO experiment and I was surprised to learn that the changes in distance they were able to detect were one-ten thousandth of the diameter of a proton (not that a proton is a hard little ball with an easily or unambiguously measurable diameter). Making some claim of fact about a particular situation requires MORE evidence than some random internet search on cherry-picked terms. At least, if you want to hold a scientifically justifiable degree of belief about its truth value. Myself, I'm skeptical that the OP captures much of interest. Oh, I forgot to mention Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. A hypothesis might have to be tested 100 or 1000 times before it is unambiguously confirmed or falsified. To do science, you have to be a critical optimist because so much you do fails to work as expected. The students that are surprised when many of their (lab) experiments fail don't usually go on to become professional scientists. It's always a relief (could we say "surprise" here? I think so) when we don't have to keep tinkering, modifying, adjusting, tuning the process/equipment being used and are able to find enough good evidence to justify a conclusion (with the rigor our peers expect). We can be surprised when the damn thing works right, and we can be surprised when it doesn't. Good scientists are usually enthusiasts, and wearing emotion (especially positive emotion) on their sleeve is necessary to compensate for the boredom and nearly continuous failures that pretty accurately describe their job.
"Being surprised" by something doesn't mean that you previously thought it impossible, only that you thought it unlikely (or hadn't even considered "it" at all, as something else seemed possible/probable).
...and what they did next will amaze you!
Its all the fault of a housewife in Pennsylvania, who has the insurance companies running scared.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Posting anonymously for reasons that will become obvious.
Gray-beard here, I've been surprised several times over things I (and others) thought we knew but were wrong. The results were in direct contradiction to established scientific knowledge. I get much less surprised now than I did forty years ago. No public papers were published either, there are areas of interest you just don't write open papers about.
If you ever meet a person who is absolutely sure about a very technical area then they are probably young and inexperienced.
That red shadow light (which is earthglow) is always there, it's just usually way below the level of illumination provided by the sun.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Journalists reporting on Science have virtually no scientific education so their stories typically mis-represent the results. They then publish a story on new results which offer sensational conclusions rather than the entirely non-surprising subsequent results that verify and validate the original results.
Another reason is the media only report on the first experimental results, which are wrong about 75% of the time, so for the majority of results, they're surprised because the results are invalid and cannot be verified by later attempts to confirm the results (i.e. The Scientific Method). They are surprised because the results are indeed impossible.
I think one of the key issues is that many discoveries happen when scientists are looking for something else. You are doing an experiment to isolate one variable and notice that you are effect something totally different and viola you have a new super strong substance or you have found a new way to dope steel to make it stronger or ... something you were not looking for. And you are surprised. And you then you do research for two years on the new thing you found and write a paper
1) Are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
2) Why?
Answer to #1 is "NO!" Constantly? Really? What do *YOU* think 'constant' means?
Answer to #2 is "Because careful research, or even a cursory pair of Google queries, demonstrates that 'conventional wisdom', the basis for much theoretical research, is confirmed far more often than it is overturned.
Google reports:
"scientists were surprised" 76,300 results
"research confirmed" 965,000 results
better than 12:1 ratio the other way: not my idea of "constantly"
I, on the other hand, *AM* "constantly surprised" at the absence of critical thinking skills frequently displayed by otherwise allegedly sensible individuals.
Well, not "constantly". More like intermittently, but frequently.
(T)he (O)ld (M)an
Perhaps this says more about science reporting than the research itself. News articles try to attract readers. Often there is something to be learned from research outcomes. If what is learned is wildly unexpected, this sensationalizes the article and attracts readers.
When I see those headlines I ask myself "Which scientists? Please name them - they're just superlatives without meaning.
While I agree with the journalist story telling discussions here, scientists should always approach the universe with wonder, surprise, and openness.
Just because we don't believe in magical ideologies, doesn't mean you should let egos replace imagination. Lack of wonder and imagination risks the very foundation of the furtherment of science.
It is impossible today for any scientist to understand everything we've collected across science. I think it's probably impossible to do in any recognized sub-field.
A large portion of the "understanding" of science is wrong. There's bad data, bad analysis, and bad evaluations out there.
When disagreeing with some of that, it is extremely difficult to simply say people are wrong. It's much easier to say that "we're surprised" about some result. If we were really good, we wouldn't be surprised by as many things. Truthfully, we're not as surprised about as much as we say we are. We're hoping to guide the emotions of key readers of our work. However, none of us really knows what we're doing.
Theyâ(TM)re not surprised. Never were. Reporters and editors add that blabber to make their articles look interesting. Usually they donâ(TM)t have a clue about what theyâ(TM)re talking about and what the significance of the findings is.
Whether or not the scientists were genuinely surprised is unknown. What is known though is that people who write such articles about scientific discoveries love hyperbole.
First, as some others point out, the question is conflating science journalism and science.
Second, honestly, this sounds like some kind of plant by an anti-science person to further the narrative of "scientists don't know what they're talking about" so they can push anti-vaxxer, climate-change-denial or some other counter-science position.
They are not true scientists, they are merely explorers who happen to find something.
Perhaps it's simply common for journalists to put that in a story because it's relatable?
Have you ever read an article that was much more mundane or equivocal than the headline promised? Scientists rarely use sensational phrases like "scientifically impossible" to describe their work, and anyone who does is basically giving you the "headline version" of what was actually found.
Science is more of a plodding business of incremental advance rather than one of frequent bombshell discoveries. Too much is already known about the world for there to be too many "Eureka!" bathtub moments, or scientists "surprised" by Apples falling on their head.
Of course occasionally some experimental outcome or accidental discovery may run counter to expectations, but given that experiments are designed to probe the limits of our knowledge it'd be a bit sensationalist to say that experimental outcome A is "surprising" vs experimental outcome B, especially since outcome A might be what the experimenter was hoping for as confirmation of some new intuition/theory in the making.
I'm not sure what sources your reading that gives the impression that science is still a non-stop party of surprising discovery, but sadly it seems more like sensationalist pop-sci journalism than reaility.
So you wanted them to expect a surprise and then not be surprised. But then they shouldn't expect to be surprised...
They do get surprises, and they do expect them. They're just not surprised to be surprised. You are.
After explaining you shouldn't be...
Scientists are explorers of the world. Not in a traveler way, but in a "gotta figure out how this really works" kind of way.
Seriously, if scientists aren't surprised periodically, they aren't doing their jobs! Scientists are supposed to discover things!
Why are scientists so often "surprised?" It's because they are doing their f-n jobs.
Discoveries that are surprises tend to be news worthy.
Had the search been on all academic articles rather than what makes the news, then there would have been a lot more of âoeconfirming our hypothesisâ types.
Scientists are steeped in theory. They have often studied for many years in universities, and may work their entire lives in a university. Their professors' teachings have been drilled into their heads. They know these teachings to be true.
Inventors and entrepreneurs are all about trying to make something new, so they can sell it. They don't really care what the professor said, they just want to make money.
Thus, the scientists is shocked by what the inventor proves to be true.
I don't think it's so much a case of a scientist setting out to prove or disprove phenomenon "A" and being surprised by the result. It's that the process of proving/disproving "A" results in the accidental discovery of previously unknown phenomena "X", "Y", and "Z".