Scientific methodology shows the way to solving challenging issues

The methodology of science, based on open inquiry, constructive disagreement and willingness to be wrong, can be a gift to the world says this Nobel prizewinner.

Saul Perlmutter, 2011 physics Nobel prizewinner, at the 2024 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. Picture: Patrick Kunkel

We are living in a period when, for the first time in history, humans know how to solve major challenges and make the world better, taking care of things such as hunger and poverty.

But Nobel prize-winning physicist Saul Perlmutter sees a disturbing paradox. It’s not happening.

“Instead we seem to be in a period in which people are scared of each other, and they’re all running away into their corners and they disagree,” says Perlmutter, who won a Nobel physics prize in 2011.

So he got together with colleagues with philosophy and social science backgrounds to examine whether the methodology of science – open inquiry, constructive disagreement, and a willingness to recognise when you’re wrong or plain don’t know – can make progress on broader social and global challenges.

That led the group to establish a very popular course more than a decade ago at the University of California Berkeley, Sense & Sensibility & Science, which examines the errors humans tend to make when they form opinions or analyse issues, and whether scientific methodology can help minimise these errors.

The course also offers a blueprint to help us find our way through everyday challenges such as making health decisions in the face of conflicting advice or deciding what is, and is not, fake news. It has been taken up by other universities, including Harvard and the University of Chicago.

Now Perlmutter, philosopher John Campbell and social psychologist Robert MacCoun have written a book presenting these ideas – Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense – so they are available to the majority of people who aren’t able to take the course.

Speaking at the 2024 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings this month, Perlmutter said the book wasn’t meant to indicate he and his fellow authors know the answers. In fact a hallmark of the scientific approach they advocate is the ability to recognise when knowledge is incomplete or possibly wrong. And he says people should also be aware of the human tendency to fool ourselves into seeing patterns in random noise.

When it comes to listening to leaders or experts, Perlmutter says “the people we’re going to really trust are the people who have told you all the weaknesses of their position”.

He says we can place more trust in those who will say upfront what evidence we should watch for that would prove them wrong. And when the evidence is not there to help us decide with any certainty what is true we should be comfortable with not knowing until better evidence is discovered. Even then its helpful to recognise that when the evidence is equivocal, whatever beliefs we form have some chance of being wrong.

Perlmutter believes this approach can help people see both sides of highly polarised issues, and contribute to resolving them in sensible ways.

He points to the debate over gay marriage, which was once highly contentious and divisive. “I still don’t understand what went on … but the centre just moved. It’s accepted now. So I’m hoping that those kinds of shifts occur for a number of these ideas that we’re trying to make more visible,” he says.

Now he and his colleagues are working on a high school version of the course so more young people can be influenced by this way of thinking.