Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Dan Schwarz, a Cornell professor and expert on the New York Times, on fake news. The bulk of the talk was on where news sources get their news and what fake news entails. However, the part that stuck out to me as most interesting was the concept of scientific debates and whether that can be considered fake news. And while this may be an unpopular opinion, I believe that it is incredibly important that all sides of a scientific debate are published in order to ensure the most accurate perspectives bubble to the top.

The biggest misconception about science is that it is the business of proving truths about the world. In fact, science is all about disproving falsehoods. When a researcher comes to a conclusion, there are one of two choices. Either they reject the null hypothesis or fail to reject the null hypothesis. This language is very specific, as it is to be made clear that nothing was proven in the experiment, just things were disproved. The most absurd example to drive the concept home is gravity. We all think of gravity as a fact of life because, well, how could you not? However, there is no way to explicitly prove gravity, but rather it simply cannot be disproved. This distinction is key for more controversial scientific debates.

And this is what brings us to the more interesting example brought up during the talk, climate change. Regardless of what you feel about the issue, there are many sides. And in order to reach a more accurate conclusion, as many of these positions as possible must be made public so that we can reject as many null hypotheses as we can. As soon as the position is that we must stop investigating the world because we know the truth, that is when the position loses its grounding in science. And if a hypothesis is faulty, then it can be easily refuted and thus rejected. Scientific “truth” occurs when a hypothesis is so good that it cannot be rejected regardless of what is tried. If we don’t have every position on the table, we can never properly assess whether a hypothesis is good enough to be thought of as a fact or if it should be rejected. So, it is important to see all sides of an argument, no matter how absurd it may seem, because it only takes one breakthrough to disprove everything we thought we knew.