Even Nobel Prize winners can confess they might be wrong

It seems increasingly difficult in our current American culture for people to acknowledge that they have been wrong about something and to change their thinking in response to that realization.

Which is one reason, no doubt, that goofy conspiracy theories continue to have life long after they've been clearly shown to be bogus, starting with the idea that Donald J. Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

But what if we had a model of someone who once was honored for his orginal, famous and world-changing conclusion but now thinks he was wrong about that? It turns out that we do have such a model, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who now suspects that the conclusion that won him the prize may well be in error. You can read about him in this Atlantic article.

As Ross Anderson writes, "Adam Reiss was 27 years old when he began the work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, and just 41 when he received it." But now Reiss thinks he may have got things wrong. And he's working to try to prove he was wrong or, to his surprise, realize that he had it right all along. He appears to have pretty much abandoned the idea that he may have been right, however. And thus he shows us how good science -- which always tests and retests its conclusions -- may help the rest of us admit, if necessary, that we had it wrong in some important matter.

It should be no surprise to anyone that institutional religion has had a lot to say about truth-telling over the centuries and about owning up to our errors when we realize that they are errors. Naturally, a lot of this owning-up business gets cast as a way of responding to our own sins, though in the case of Reiss, what he may have been wrong about could, in no serious world, be considered a sin. And yet religious ideas about confessing we were wrong still can provide some guidance today.

Proverbs 16:18, for instance, tells us that "Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall." If Reiss (or any scientist) had such pride in his discoveries and conclusions, his "fall" might be painful and career-wrecking. But, as I say, in good science one is always testing past results and looking for ways we may have gotten things wrong. Yes, scientists can be proud of Nobel Prizes, but they always know that a generation or six down the road, a future researcher may have good reason to cast serious doubt about the conclusions that led to the prize.

Like many religions, Islam, too, urges followers to acknowledge errors and "turn to God in sincere repentence," as the Qur'an puts it in 66:8.

The model that good science can give us is not simply to admit when we are or might be wrong but to spend some time figuring out how we went astray and to learn from that. Which seems to be exactly what Adam Reiss is doing now. And can't we all name some political leaders who, we wish, would do the same thing?

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Lake Junaluska, N.C. -- I'm here for a few days to speak at a gathering of the Friends of Woodstock School. That's the school in the foothills of the Himalayas in India that I attended for a time while I was a boy. So there won't be a second item here on the blog today. The blog should return to something like normal either this Wednesday or next Saturday.