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?

Comments

Clarke's First Law

[mentil]

"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

Re: Because it gives you more funding

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. More people read a 'surprising' article, than something about 'theory z confirmed/rejected'.

Surprises are more interesting, hence no surprise that scientists are surprised. Especially if the topic isn't too hot.

They didn't act surprised about the Higgs boson, because it was hot enough on its own. No marketing tricks needed to sell that story.

Different meaning

[pz]

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.

Unexpected results

[gordona]

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.

Surprising results often wrong

[Roger W Moore]

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.