Science: Wandering with a Compass
- Baiju Mathew
- Apr 25
- 6 min read
Dark Comet, yes that is the topic of the article I am reading right now in the May 2025 edition of Scientific American. My first thought? “Oh! another ‘dark’ thingi”. Anything that refuses to conform to laws of gravity is promptly labelled “Dark”; dark matter, dark energy and now ,… dark comet!
Let not my narration overtake the story. Scientists observed certain asteroid like
objects with trajectories that move more like comets. Their paths cannot be accounted for by equations of gravity even after correcting for factors like solar wind. They are trying to figure out how it can have non-gravitational accelerations without the outgassing seen in comets. So, as is now fashionable they propose the title “Dark Comet” for these rebel objects in space.
I respond with a sigh – equal parts fascination and fatigue. We have a growing list of dark entities dark matter, dark energy etc. Both of them have striking similarities with
other concepts like the cosmological constant. At some level, these seem more arguments from convenience than true scientific breakthroughs. One is reminded of the defenders of the Ptolemaic model of sun going around the Earth, in order to explain the erratic loops of planetary motion—say, that of Mercury— conjured up epicycles, theoretical add-ons tailored to save a geocentric worldview
Then came Copernicus, whose heliocentric model made sense of it all with elegant simplicity. Mercury’s loops? Merely the optical illusion of one planet overtaking another in their respective orbits around the Sun. No epicycles, no metaphysical patchwork—just a better map of the cosmos.
For an explaination of the two models watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khIzr6610cQ
Scientific progress always looks so elegant when we look back into the past. Is it not the same anymore? Perhaps the contempraries of the great scientists of the past also saw their world as confusing, with various tentative and half baked theories being proposed. Imagine ourselves in the late 1600s, eavesdropping on a cosmic tug-of-war between two titans—Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens—each proposing radically different theories about the nature of light.
Newton, having demonstrated that light travels in straight lines, advanced his corpuscular theory: light, he argued, was composed of tiny particles. Meanwhile, Huygens championed the wave theory, suggesting that every point on a wavefront generates new spherical wavelets, which together form the next wavefront—thus propelling light forward like ripples in a pond.
Both, however, ran into problems and responded in ways that feel suspiciously familiar— in a way, “tailoring the theory to fit the facts,” not unlike the Ptolemaic defenders of geocentrism with their epicycles.
Newton had observed what we now understand as interference phenomena, the
coloured rings seen on soap bubbles or thin films. Rather than question his particle theory, he proposed an exotic idea that light particles experience “fits of easy reflection and transmission.” In essence, photons had regular mood swings—sometimes bouncing off surfaces, sometimes passing through them—depending on their inexplicable temperament at the time.
Huygens, on the other hand, knew that light travels in straight lines, so his model
raised awkward questions. If each point emits spherical waves, why doesn’t light spread out in all directions—or even travel backwards? Rather than wrestle with that, he simply dismissed the inconvenient half of the math. Backward propagation? Never heard of it. He focused on the forward-moving wavefront, brushing the rest under the metaphysical rug.
In the 1800s, Young’s famous double-slit experiment finally offered a satisfying explanation for interference patterns, firmly establishing the wave nature of light and, at least temporarily, relegating Newton’s corpuscles to the realm of elegant but incorrect speculation. The mystery of light’s forward-only propagation was also resolved through the work of Young and Fresnel—though the gritty mathematical details need not detain us here.
Science, like light itself, has a penchant for surprise. Fast-forward to the 20th century: Einstein, while probing the photoelectric effect (now the principle behind those ubiquitous solar panels), argued that light must consist of particles after all. For this bold heresy, he won the Nobel Prize. Today’s consensus? Light exists as both wave and particle, a diplomatic if baffling duality.
Enter Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)—a theory so precise it predicts an electron’s magnetic moment to a precision of 12 decimals. According to QED, light is indeed
made up of particles, and just as Newton proposed, these particles sometimes reflect, sometimes transmit, based on a concept termed as 'Probablity Amplitudes', which is a complex number that squares up to give the probablity of a particular outcome. Newton’s “fits of easy reflection and transmission,” once dismissed as speculative indulgence, now echo eerily in QED’s probability amplitudes. I am not suggesting that Newton was ahead of the times, in this matter, his theory was unfounded and just happens to poetically overlap with the findings of Q.E.D. Light, in the view of Q.E.D., explores every possible path. Each photon dances to its own tune, darting in all directions, and yet, collectively, they obey the familiar laws—like the law of reflection—not by compulsion but by overwhelming statistical probability. It is a beautifully orchestrated chaos. This concept is beautifully explained in a small book by Richard Feynman called “Q.E.D. The Strange Theory of Light and Matter”.
To my untrained mind, the idea of probability amplitudes in Quantum Electrodynamics (Q.E.D.) is elegant mathematics—but not entirely satisfying as a physical theory. Certainly, it is more rigorous than Newton’s whimsical notion of ‘fits of easy reflection and transmission,’ but one still yearns for a tactile, intuitive analogue. Hold that thought; we shall return to it shortly.
The point of this entire discussion is to probe the essence of science. As a child, I naively assumed science to be a grand repository of knowledge—those charts of the periodic table, the laws of motion, and the dissection diagrams that populated our school textbooks. As I grew older, I came to see science not as a vault of eternal truths, but as a method—a disciplined, relentless tool to explore the world and propose explanations. The knowledge it generates is, at best, provisional—true only until proven otherwise.
This is why the philosophers of the Vienna Circle insisted on verifiability. And Karl Popper took it a step further—falsifiability. Science, they argued, must make claims that can be tested and potentially refuted. For instance, Newton’s law of gravitation proposes that if you drop a stone, its motion will obey an inverse square relationship. If, in repeated trials, it does not then Newton’s law is, quite simply, wrong.
By that standard, the theory of the “dark comet” remains in the penumbra of hypothesis. Until it offers testable predictions—statements that can be verified or falsified—it inhabits the borderlands of scientific legitimacy, not its inner sanctum.
Science, then, is not a cathedral of eternal certainties but a ship constantly rebuilt at sea—new theories replacing old when they offer better maps of reality. In the words of Newton himself: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Coming to Q.E.D., its predictions are verifiable, and every experiment conducted so far has affirmed its truth. It is no longer in the domain of speculative thought. Yet, as I have already confessed, I find it intellectually unsatisfying, perhaps a reflection of my own limitations. I long for a physical analogue to probability amplitude, some tangible hook for the imagination to grasp. We were raised on the certainties of classical mechanics, where one could picture velocity, angular momentum, or the tug of gravity with intuitive clarity. Modern physics has transcended that realm—it operates in abstractions that elude our sensory intuition.
I have lost the exact reference, but in one of his books, Roger Penrose writes—there are two (perhaps three?) reasons why we fail to grasp a concept. The first, and lesser reason, is that we simply do not understand it. The second, and far more troubling, is that we do understand it—but cannot bring ourselves to accept its implications. Perhaps the latter stands between me and a full-hearted embrace of Q.E.D.'s conclusions.
If we observe closely, science does not concern itself with the metaphysical “why” of things—it specializes instead in answering the “how.” Newton’s law of universal gravitation, for example, does not tell us why the Earth attracts the Moon. It merely describes, with mathematical precision, how this attraction behaves: that the gravitational force is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The why—in the deeper, philosophical sense—remains outside the remit of empirical science.
What makes science so powerful is not certainty, but its relentless pursuit of better explanations. At its core lies a discipline of brutal honesty and intellectual humility. Every scientific statement is tentative, always one falsifying observation away from revision or rejection. The scientist, then, must be ready for that moment—with integrity, not defensiveness. It is this readiness to be proven wrong that makes science not just a body of knowledge, but a way of thinking—rigorous, self-correcting, and profoundly human.
Comments