Wow. Not accurate is right—and graciously understated. My jaw dropped when I read the claim that the Big Bang can’t be tested. Perhaps Jon meant that the Big Bang can’t be “replayed” from its initial moments of space-time expansion from the singularity?? (Perhaps not. I can’t say for sure what Jon meant here so I will proceed in the remainder of this post only to speak in more general terms.)
When someone tells me that some event or phenomenon X can’t be tested, I often wonder if they are also misunderstanding what is meant by science being “repeatable”. (Various misunderstandings of science tend to get packaged together, obviously.) I have many Young Earth Creationist friends who think that “For something to be science, it must be repeatable in the laboratory” and therefore they say things like, “If abiogenesis is true, scientists would be able to create life in the lab.” and “If evolutionary science is valid, scientists should be able to evolve a whale from a hippopotamus.” [Yes, they are misunderstanding a lot of things in those sentences but I’ll focus for now on just repeatability.]
On several occasions I’ve heard people (even somewhat prominent speakers/writers) say that the Big Bang Theory can’t be valid science because “it can’t be repeated and studied in the lab”. I have wondered if they reject virtually all of astronomy and facts like the orbital period of Pluto because one can’t replicate the solar system in a laboratory and because a complete 248-year orbit of Pluto around the sun has not been observed by any scientist due to the reality that Pluto has only been observed by people since 1930.
Of course, I also wonder how people like Ken Ham can appear to reject all of forensic science because of his smug retort: “Were you there?” I have always wanted to ask him if he drove home from work one day and found his house gone, but a pile of smoldering debris in its place, would his not being there to observe the day’s events mean that he would have no possible idea of what happened? If called for jury duty in a case involving forensic evidence and no observers testifying as witnesses to the alleged crime, would Ken Ham disqualify himself? (After all, wouldn’t he always have to claim reasonable doubt and a not guilty verdict, even if there was lots of DNA evidence identifying the culprit who murdered in private while unobserved?)
Testing, falsification, and repeatability are all very important in science but I’ve wondered what percentage of Americans understand what those terms mean. (Indeed, repeatability in science is not just about duplicating some thing or phenomenon in the laboratory. Repeatability is about other scientists being able to apply the same methodologies and observations and coming up with very similar data.)
I’ve long emphasized to my students that every scientific observation involves observation of the past by collecting data. This is obvious when an astronomer photographs the sun and captures photos which can tell us what happened on the sun about 8.3 minutes ago. But this time-lag may be less intuitively obvious in the laboratory when a visual observation of an experiment—or a electronic sensor connected by a wire cable—tells us what happened just a few nanoseconds ago. (I remember learning in grad school how to plan on about 8 to 12 inches of signal delay per nanosecond, depending on the material and conditions.) So one can say that scientists are always collecting data from the past, which I don’t think Ken Ham has ever thought through when he asks skeptically, “Were you there?”
My apologies for the tangent but I’m fascinated by these phenomena in the public’s perceptions of what scientists do.