Priyamvada Natarajan Quotes
Progress in science occurs in fits and starts, and paradigm shifts occur when evidence can be marshaled to support a new point of view.
Natarajan, Priyamvada. Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos. Yale University Press, 2016.
He was addressing the misunderstanding that many laypeople and most anti-evolutionists have that if Evolution is only a theory why put so much stock in it. The layman often uses the word “theory” in opposition to “fact.” But to the scientist theories are of different types—those that are as of yet speculation and those for which a strong body of evidence exists. Evolution, like Relativity, has a huge amount of evidence supporting it. Yet in time every good scientist knows that all these proven theories will be modified with new knowledge. Relativity has been demonstrated as having errors initially by Einstein himself. The essence of these things are true although elements change. The early law of gravity is the best example. We know that it is wrong in many, circumstances—in space for example. But it, none the less, is fundamental to much analysis and with our much more sophisticated understanding of it we still talk of the “Law” of gravity even though we realize that it is not quite correct in all circumstances.
This characteristic of science causes the politicians great difficulty when allocating public funds for scientific research. It is often very hard to attribute credit to the right scientist when a scientist herself might not yet realize the great significance of her work. Of a number of different scientists each contributing one step of a process when the person who worked on the last link could not possibly have done it without the others along the way. Who to fund and why is terribly frustrating which is why the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health make most of their funding decisions on the basis of proposals and peer review and decision making. None the less, many politicians are constantly trying to interject their preferences, almost always based on their ignorance, especially when they can get research funds into their district.
While this is often true, it is another Mises exaggeration using the word “every” in this quotation. Darwin’s theory of evolution was immediately accepted by most other scientists and intellectuals. The opponents then were the religious fundamentalists. The same is true today. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was accepted by most other scientist as soon as they read it and worked out the mathematics. That was before there was any physical or experimental evidence, which did not come till 1919.
Priyamvada (Priya) Natarajan is a professor in the departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University. She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly with her work in gravitational lensing, and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. She authored the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.
