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Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Aimee Hopper answered on 18 Jun 2014:
yeh, everyone will have someone in the world disagree with what they are saying at some point. And it’s good 🙂 It makes way for good discussion, thorough analysis and, hopefully, the right way to go.
Some people think my research wont work because it doesn’t make sense to them. Obviously I disagree 🙂
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Dave Jones answered on 18 Jun 2014:
Abandoned is a strong word! But, scientists disagree all the time, that’s how we make progress. Someone has an idea and tries to prove it, while someone who disagrees tries to disprove it. In the end, everyone respects the evidence, we learn who was right and keep on trying to understand what is going on!
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Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 19 Jun 2014:
I agree with Dave, ‘abandon’ is a pretty strong word! Usually people will tell me if they disagree, or they will ask questions if they think something is wrong, to try to understand what is my point of view. Personally, I always find it very motivating to have someone else’s input and opinion on my work, because they bring new ideas and perspectives that by myself I didn’t think about. It helps seeing things from a different angle, which is great. We can talk about why they don’t agree with my work, and if they tell me about something I didn’t know before, than it’s great because I learnt something new! If they tell me they disagree because I made a sign mistake, then it’s a bit embarrassing, but at least they helped fixing it so I can go forward!
Generally, there is always a number of researchers working on different alternative theories. For example, with inflation (what I work on) my Masters supervisor was one of the world expert on ‘alternative’ theories. He didn’t like inflation at all, but he still had great respect for all the scientists working on it (and he also wrote many papers on it himself!). So I spent 2 years doing research on those alternative theories, and other scientists working on inflation always found my work very interesting, even if they did think it was the right model of nature.
I think the general philosophy is that it’s always important to have many alternative theories that make predictions about one thing in science. If we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t be able to say what is a test of a theory, and what is something generic that all theories predict easily. So, at least in my field, scientists are always very respectful of one another, even if they work on competing theories.
The great thing about science is that it’s not about opinions, it’s about facts and experiments and proofs in the end, and it’s true regardless of my personal opinion, so I always try to focus on what I learn about how nature works, which is always fascinating and motivating!
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Greig Cowan answered on 25 Jun 2014:
I think abandoned is too strong a word. Disagreements happen all of the time in science, but this is how we make progress: by questioning our evidence, looking for holes in our argument etc. By doing that, we can hopefully get closer and closer to the underlying truth. I think most (all?) scientists have disagreed at some point, but what is nice about scientists is that they will usually be happy to change their minds about something if they are presented with clear evidence to support another point of view. This is a really important point about science.
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