{"id":4365,"date":"2026-03-11T09:10:33","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T09:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/martinemussies.nl\/web\/?p=4365"},"modified":"2026-03-11T09:11:04","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T09:11:04","slug":"on-the-myth-of-exact-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/martinemussies.nl\/web\/on-the-myth-of-exact-science\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Comfortable Lie of Exactitude"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by a humanities scholar, currently bewildered and at home, at NASA’s Astrobiology Institute<\/em>… <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I spend years studying how language constructs authority. I wrote about epistemic power, about the violence of categorisation, about the way institutional discourse produces what it claims merely to describe. I was, by any reasonable measure, a humanities person. I used words like “heteronormativity” without apology and cited Donna Haraway at dinner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I started attending NASA courses and webinars. And now, apparently, I will be speaking at a conference on astrobiology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am still not entirely sure how this happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

What I have learnt \u2014 and what I will, with some nervousness, argue in front of a room full of people whose CVs contain the word “astrophysics” \u2014 is that the natural sciences and the humanities share a foundational embarrassment that neither discipline is especially eager to discuss in polite company. That embarrassment is this: no one actually knows<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not definitively. Not finally. Not in the way that the phrase “exact science” implies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term itself is a category error dressed in respectable clothing. “Exact” originally referred to method \u2014 to the use of mathematics, measurement, and formalisation \u2014 not to the certainty of outcomes. Disciplines that count and calculate were distinguished from disciplines that interpret and contextualise. It was a taxonomic convenience, not an ontological guarantee. Somewhere along the way, the convenience hardened into myth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I notice things like this. I always have. When language begins to do more work than the evidence it describes, I tend to fixate on the gap. My colleagues have occasionally found this quality useful. More often, they have found it exhausting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Here is the gap I cannot stop looking at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In astrobiology, we talk about biosignatures: chemical or physical indicators that might suggest the presence of life on another world. Oxygen and methane coexisting in an atmosphere. Certain spectroscopic anomalies. Ratios that do not add up without a biological explanation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The excitement around these signals is entirely legitimate. But what I have noticed, sitting in these webinars with my notebook full of questions that probably reveal my outsider status immediately, is that a biosignature is not evidence of life. It is evidence of something that our current models cannot explain abiotically<\/em>. That is a significantly smaller claim, and the distance between those two phrasings is where entire research programmes live and die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Newton’s mechanics did not collapse when Einstein arrived. They were revealed to be a precise approximation; extraordinarily useful within a certain domain, quietly wrong outside it. The history of science is not a procession of truths. It is a procession of better-calibrated uncertainties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the humanities taught me \u2014 and what I think astrobiologists already know but do not always say aloud \u2014 is that the frameworks we use to ask questions also constrain the answers we can receive. Our definition of life is Earth-derived. Our instruments are built around assumptions about chemistry that evolved here, under these conditions, with this particular evolutionary history. We are searching a universe of unimaginable scale with tools shaped by a single data point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is not a criticism. It is a description of the actual epistemic situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Karl Popper said that science progresses through falsification. David Hume said that induction cannot be rationally justified. Both were correct. Both observations are, in practice, largely ignored by working scientists who have deadlines and grant applications and a reasonable faith that the universe will behave tomorrow as it behaved yesterday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I understand the pragmatism. I have come to share it, to an extent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I will stand at that podium and say what I believe to be true: that the most honest scientists are those who treat their certainties as provisional, their models as metaphors, and their data as a conversation with a universe that has not yet finished speaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exact science is what we call science when we have temporarily stopped noticing how approximate it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The universe, to the best of our knowledge, does not mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by a humanities scholar, currently bewildered and at home, at NASA’s Astrobiology Institute…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4366,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[622],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scientific-notes"],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn the Comfortable Lie of Exactitude » Martine Mussies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A humanities scholar at NASA\u2019s Astrobiology Institute reflects on biosignatures, uncertainty, and the myth of \u201cexact science.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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