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| On the trail of the Higgs Boson |
Posted by Keith Tidman
What are 'facts'? The
ages-long history of deception and
sleights of hand and mind — including propaganda and political and
psychological
legerdemain — demonstrates just one of the many applications of false
facts. But similar presentations of falsities meant to deceive, sow
discord,
or distract have been even more rife today, via the handiness and global
ubiquity of the Internet. An enabler is the too-frequent lack of
judicious
curation and vetting of facts. And, in the process of democratizing
access to
facts, self-serving individuals may take advantage of those consumers of
information who are ill-equipped
or disinclined (unmotivated) to discern whether or not content is true.
Spurious facts dot the Internet landscape, steering beliefs, driving
confirmation bias, and conjuring tangible outcomes such as voting
decisions. Interpretations of facts become all the more confounding in
political arenas, where interpretations (the understanding) of facts
among differently minded politicians becomes muddled, and ‘what’s
actually the case’ remains opaque.
And yet surely it is the total anthology of facts — meaning things
(their properties), concepts, and their interrelationships — that composes reality.
Facts have multiple dimensions, including what one knows (epistemological
aspects), how one semantically describes what’s known (linguistic aspects), and
what meaning and purpose one attributes to what’s known (metaphysical aspects).
Facts are known on a sliding scale of
certainty. An example that seems compelling to me comes from just a few years ago, when scientists announced that they had
confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, whose field generates mass through
its interaction with other particles. The Higgs’s existence had been postulated
earlier in mathematical terms, but empirical evidence was tantalizingly sought
over a few decades. The ultimate confirmation was given a
certainty of ‘five sigma’: that there was less than 1 chance in 3.5 million
that what was detected was instead a random fluctuation. Impressive enough from
an empirical standpoint to conclude discovery (a fact), yet still short
of absolute certainty. With
resort to empiricism, there is no case where some measure of doubt (of a
counterfactual), no matter how infinitesimally small, is excluded.
Mathematics, meantime, provides an
even higher level of certainty (rigor of method and of results) in applying
facts to describe reality: Newtonian, Einsteinian, quantum theoretical, and other
models of scientific realism. Indeed, mathematics, in its precise syntax,
universal vocabulary, and singular purpose, is sometimes referred to as the
language of reality. Indeed, as opposed to the world’s many natural languages
(whose known shortcomings limit understanding), mathematics is the best, and
sometimes the only, language for describing select facts of science
(mathematical Platonism) — whereby mathematics is less invented than it is
discovered as a special case of realism.
Facts are also contingent. Consider
another example from science: Immediately following the singularity of the Big
Bang, an inflationary period occurred (lasting a tiny fraction of a second).
During that inflationary period, the universe — that is, the edges of space-time
(not the things within space-time) — expanded faster than the speed of light,
resulting in the first step toward the cosmos’s eventual lumpiness, in the
form of galaxies, stars, planets. The laws — that is, the facts — of physics were
different during the inflation than what scientists are familiar with
today — today’s laws of physics breaking down as one looks back closer and closer
to the singularity. In this cosmological paradigm, facts are contingent on the
peculiar circumstances of the inflationary epoch. This realization points broadly to something capable of being a fact even if we don’t fully understand it.
The sliding scale of certainty and
facts’ contingency apply all the more acutely when venturing into other fields.
Specifically, the recording of historical events, personages, and ideas, no
matter the scholarly intent, often contain biases — judgments, symbols,
interpretations — brought to the page by those historians whose contemporaneous
accounts may be tailored to self-serving purposes, tilting facts and analyses.
In natural course, follow-on historians inadvertently adopt those original
biases while not uncommonly folding in their own. Add to this mix the
dynamic, complex, and unpredictable (chaotic) nature of human affairs, and the
result is all the more shambolic. The accretion of biases over the decades,
centuries, and millennia doesn’t of course change reality as such— what happened
historically has an underlying matter-of-factness, even if it lingers between
hard and impossible to tease out. But the accretion does distort (and on
occasion even falsify) what’s understood.
This latter point suggests that what’s
a fact and what’s true might either intersect or diverge; nothing excludes either possibility. That is, facts may be true (describe reality) or false (don’t
describe reality), depending on their content. (Fairies don’t exist in physical
form — in that sense, are false — but do exist nonetheless, legendarily woven into elaborate cultural lore — and in that sense, are true.) What’s true
or false will always necessitate the presence of facts, to aid determinations
about truth-values. Whereas facts simply stand out there: entirely indifferent to
what’s true or false, or what’s believed or known, or what’s formally proven,
or what’s wanted and sought after, or what’s observable. That is, absent litmus
tests of verifiability. In this sense, given that facts don’t necessarily have
to be about something that exists, ‘facts’ and ‘statements’ serve interchangeably.
Facts’ contingency also hinges in some
measured, relativistic way on culture. Not as a universally normative standard for all facts or for
all that’s true, of course, but in ways that matter and give shared purpose to
citizens of a particular society. Acknowledged facts as to core values — good
versus evil, spirituality, integrity, humanitarianism, honesty,
trustworthiness, love, environmental stewardship, fairness, justice, and so
forth — often become rooted in society. Accordingly, not everyone’s facts are
everyone else’s: facts are shaped and shaded both by
society and by the individual. The result is the culture-specific normalising of
values — what one ‘ought’ to do, ideally. As such, there is no fact-value dilemma. In this
vein, values don’t have to be objective to be factual — foundational beliefs, for
example, suffice. Facts related to moral realism, unlike scientific and
mathematical realism, have to be invented; they’re not discoverable as
already-existing phenomena.
Facts are indispensable to describing
reality, in both its idealistic (abstract) and realistic (physical) forms. There
is no single, exclusive way to define facts; rationalism, empiricism, and
idealism all pertain. Yet subsets of facts, and their multifaceted relationships that intricately bear on each other’s truth or falsity,
enable knowledge and meaning (purpose) to emerge — an understanding, however
imperfect, of slices of abstract and physical reality that our minds piece
together as a mosaic.
In short, the complete anthology of facts relates to all possible
forms of reality, ranging the breadth of possibilities, from figments to suppositions to the
verifiable phenomenal world.
