Johannes Kepler, Not Newton or Einstein, Is Science’s Best Role Model

For a great many people in the world, the hardest words to say are simply these three: “I was wrong.” It’s as though simply admitting you were mistaken about something — even though the only way we learn is by making an attempt, often resulting in a sub-optimal outcome, especially when you’re doing it for the first time or with incomplete knowledge — is somehow a personal failing, or even an admission of defeat. Even if the evidence is overwhelmingly decisive that your idea or conception is unsupported, most people will instead find a way to discount or ignore that evidence and stick to their guns. People’s minds are notoriously resistant to change, and the greater their own personal stake in the outcome of the issue under debate, the less open they are to even the possibility that they might not be 100% in the right.

Although it’s often asserted that science is the exception to this general rule, that’s only true of science as a collective enterprise. On an individual basis, scientists are just as susceptible to confirmation bias — overweighting all supporting evidence and discounting any evidence to the contrary — as any other human in any other walk of life. In particular, the greatest difficulties lie in store for those who themselves have formulated ideas and invested tremendous efforts, often amounting to years or even decades worth of time and effort, into hypotheses that simply cannot explain the full suite of data that humanity has amassed. This applies even to the greatest minds in all of history.

• Albert Einstein could never accept quantum indeterminism as a fundamental property of nature, but his philosophical preference — for locally real theories — has been demonstrated to be invalid.
• Arthur Eddington could never accept quantum degeneracy as the source of the pressure that held white dwarfs up against gravitational collapse, but it is, in fact, the reason.
• Newton could never accept the experiments that demonstrated the wave nature of light, including interference and diffraction, but his corpuscular theory cannot, in fact, explain those phenomena.
• And Fred Hoyle could never accept the Big Bang as the correct story of our cosmic origins, even nearly 40 years after the critical evidence, in the form of the cosmic microwave background, was discovered. He died without ever coming around to reality.

But one person stands above the rest as an exemplar for how to behave when the evidence comes in against your brilliant idea: Johannes Kepler, who showed us the way more than 400 years ago. Here’s the story of his scientific evolution, which serves as an example that we should all strive to emulate.