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PREFACE
At this moment in time, perhaps more than any before it, it is essential that the public have a fundamental understanding of the practice of science—that is to say, not only the results at which scientists arrive but how they do so. Examples of this urgency surround us. To name what is probably the most urgent, we must make some essential decisions in order to fight climate change. For decades, science has been warning us that human behavior is setting the stage for a dramatic rise in the temperature of our planet. But science alone is not enough. Forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes—but only if we heed the warning and act on it.
Unfortunately, the actions taken by governments to date have not been up to this challenge, and the results so far have been extremely modest. Now that climate change is starting to affect people’s lives, there is perhaps a stronger reaction, but we need much more forceful measures to be taken. Political decisions are needed, especially by the wealthiest countries. We need to transcend our myopic national interests in order to solve global problems. To name a second example, COVID has taught us that we are all connected: what happens in game markets or in the Amazon rain forest deeply affects us all. The recent pandemic has also shown that it is not easy to respond effectively in time. We have seen how measures to contain the pandemic were often taken too late, only when they could no longer be postponed. I remember the head of one European government saying that “we cannot go into lockdown until the hospitals are full; otherwise people will not understand the decision to do so.”
Our generation is on a road fraught with dangers. It is as if we were driving at night: the sciences are our headlights, but it is the responsibility of the driver to not leave the road and to take into account that the headlights have a limited range. In order to use those lights in the first place, however, we need to have trust in science.
We have seen during the pandemic the tragedy of the many people who have died refusing to be vaccinated, despite the millions of COVID-related deaths. This has happened thanks to a re- jection of science that becomes even more serious when it occurs in relation to climate change.
If citizens and politicians do not trust science, we will move inexorably in the wrong direction, and the struggle against any number of global ills—global warming, infectious disease, hunger and poverty, the depletion of the planet’s natural resources— will fail.
How can we promote this trust? Clearly it is not enough for scientists themselves to simply say “trust us.” It is also not enough to write scholarly articles about how science works. We must, as the saying goes, show our work: demonstrate in an engaging way how scientists toil, doubt, succeed, and fail. It is important to understand how scientific consensus is achieved, how individual discoveries become validated by the scientific community.
To this end, in this book I have told something of my own story through select reports on significant episodes in my scientific life. I begin with my research into the flight of starlings, those remarkably beautiful murmurations (their flocking behavior) that the physics of this century is only now in a position to explain. I wanted to start there to emphasize how difficult it is to understand the many phenomena that we observe almost daily and to convey that complexity is not about what happens in laboratories. It is about what happens all around us. Our job as scientists is to illuminate for everyone the truths that we discover.
