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Jim Al-Khalili has an enviable gig. The Iraqi-British scientist gets to ponder some of the deepest questionsWhat is time? How do natures forces work?while living the life of a TV and radio personality. Al-Khalili hosts The Life Scientific, a show on BBC Radio 4 featuring his interviews with scientists on the impact of their research and what inspires and motivates them. Hes also presented documentaries and authored popular science books, including a novel, Sun Fall, about the crisis that unfolds when, in 2041, Earths magnetic field starts to fail. His latest book, The Joy of Science, is his response to a different crisis.

The Joy of Science was motivated by this sense that a lot of us have, that public discourse is becoming increasingly polarized, Al-Khalili tells Nautilus. There seems to be a rise in irrational, anti-scientific thinking, and conspiracy theories. And theres no room for debate, particularly amplified by the internet and social media. His message is that we should all be thinking more critically. If we could export some of the ideas of science, when science is done well, into everyday life, I think we would all be happier, more empowered.

Al-Khalili tells me that doling out advice is quite the departure for him. But after a long career in physics and science communication, he says with a laugh, Ive reached that stage where I arrogantly think I can impart wisdom to the world. In our interview, Al-Khalili discusses, among other things, the unprecedented level of cognitive dissonance nowadays, whats wrong with Occams razor, and whether ideological thinking conflicts with a scientific mindset. He also defends scientific realism, and walks me through a puzzle about light that Einstein dreamt up as a teenager.

What drove you to write a book about living by the scientific method now?

We are bombarded by information all the time, and your average person really doesnt know who or what to trust. But we can learn to know who and what to trust. We can employ some of the ways that we do scienceexamining biases, the importance of uncertainty, being prepared to change your mind in the light of new evidence. Those sorts of things go against human nature because we want to be right about our opinions. We dont like to be told we are wrong. But thats not the way we do things in science.

Do you have a memorable example of a scientist admitting they made a mistake?

I have a lovely story. A few years ago, I made a documentary for the BBC called Gravity and Me. Wed finished filming, and I was due to go into the studio to do the voiceover, and it was due to be aired on British TV a few weeks later, and we discovered that Id made a mistake. I was trying to explain the idea of clocks running at different rates in Earths gravity. Because time runs slower, not just when you travel close to the speed of light, but also when you are in a strong gravitational field. We went back to the BBC and said, Look, hold on to the transmission. Weve made a mistake. And they said, Fine. Well do that. Reshoot all the stuff that you got wrong and put in the correct stuff and that will be the wiser.

And I said, Actually, this is a really good opportunity to explain how science works and that we do make mistakes and that its okay to make mistakes. How about if I make it as part of the documentary? I say, Unfortunately, at this point I realized Id got it wrong and in fact, its such and such.' And the guys at BBC, the commissioning editor, were quite nervous about this. They said, Oh, Jim, we are concerned about your reputation as a professor of physics if you admit your mistake publicly like that. I said, Well, clearly you dont understand how science works. Its not something to be ashamed of to admit you are wrong.

And I stood by my guns and we absolutely made sure that was part of the documentary. I was getting emails from people after, saying, Oh, Jim, youre so brave to admit your mistake. I said, No. Its great. I mean, thats how we learn, thats how we do science. Theres nothing wrong with that.

Science is carried out and funded by humans with various biases and motives. But would you say it still is a uniquely trustworthy enterprise?

This is not an easy issue. Science of course is very broad. In my area of research in theoretical physics, to a large extent it is value-free. The equations of quantum mechanics that I might come up with or write down will be exactly the same, whether theyre discovered by physicists in China or Russia. Theres a universality about the laws of physics that transcend cultures and political ideologies. But of course there are lots of areas of science, particularly in the social sciences, dealing with the complexity of human behavior, where its difficult to avoid value judgements and biases. And thats just the way scientists have to behave, to try and remove biases, or examine their own biases.

Einstein believed theres a real world out there and its sciences job to get as close as we can to that truth.

Its even more difficult for the wider public, who are not trained in science, to know who to trust and what to trust. You see something on YouTube or you read an article onlinehow do you know (a) whether its good science and its based on firm evidence and data, and (b) whether whoever is getting that idea across has their own vested interests? Many scientists work for corporations and industry, in the pay of people who do have other vested interests, so it is difficult.

My message is that you shouldnt take a lot of these ideas at face value. We have to invest some effort into digging in to find out whether something comes from a reputable source or not. To some extent, we may have to rely on technology to help us do that filtering. But even that comes with its dangers. Whos creating the AI thats telling you what is fake news and what is good news? As a society, we have to have this discussion because we need to know how to discriminate among all the information that we are being bombarded with every day.

How confident are you that AI can be relied on to show us trustworthy information?

Well, Im quite nervous about how well we can utilize AI. But we are going to have to use AI to help us filter the trustworthy information from the misinformation and disinformation. But the problem is, who creates that AI algorithm? If its Google or Facebook that is filtering what we receive, and they say, Look, weve removed all this other stuff because thats misinformation. Well, who says? Is that AI built by someone with an ideological stance? Were going to have to figure out ways of making sure that AI is completely neutral on this matter. Maybe its providing us with a forum where we can debate things a bit more rationally and civilly than we are at the moment. Theres too much information out there for us as a society to develop our own rational skills to decide for ourselves. Were going to have to make use of technology, but we have to be very careful about how we implement it.

How helpful is Occams razorthe idea of favoring simple explanationsin deciding where to place our trust?

William of Occam was this medieval monk who actually lived very near to my university, University of Surrey in England, and the razor thats named after him is simply that if you have lots of different explanations, chances are the simplest one is the right one. That served us well in science, but there are dangerous pitfalls because things arent always as simple as wed like them to be. And when you apply that in everyday life, its even more problematic because we are living in a world now where we want the simplest explanation.

Dont blind me with details. This is what I believe, this simple idea. And this is what Im going to go with. Very often, issues that we have to deal with in everyday life are more complicated. Not everything can be reduced to a meme or a tweet. And yet we see the problems we have today, with the polarization of ideologies, particularly on social media, where each side is so absolute and certain in their position, and they dont want to acknowledge that actually an issue is more complex, more complicated, more nuanced.

How would you revise Occams razor?

Maybe, Its not the simplest explanation that is the right one, but the most useful explanation. It could be that sometimesand certainly in science if we want to describe a conceptit is more complicated than wed like it to be, and we have to acknowledge that and bite that bullet.

In the book, you mention a thought experiment that Einstein, as a teenager, came up with to get a handle on the unintuitive behavior of light. He wondered: If you were traveling at the speed of light, holding a mirror in front of your face, would you see your reflection? How do you answer that?

The issue is if you are flying at the speed of light and the mirror is in front of you, to see your face reflected in the mirror, light has to bounce off your face, onto the mirror, and then back into your eyes again. But if you are traveling at the speed of light, how can light ever overtake you, reach the mirror and come back again?

The answer is, Yes, we will always see our reflection because Einsteins theory of relativity tells us that all motion is relative. Im traveling at the speed of lightaccording to what reference? There will always be a frame of reference in which I can say, Im not moving at all. And this is Einsteins great breakthrough in 1905, his special theory of relativity, which says that the speed of light is absolute. It doesnt matter how fast youre moving, you will always see light traveling at that same speed, the maximum speed in our universe.

Learn that theres no shame in changing your mind in the light of new information.

And so me flying, holding a mirror in front of my face, will be no different to me standing still holding a mirror in front of my face. I always see my reflection. Relativity theory forces us to rethink the notion of distances and time intervals. The example I always give to my students is, if I shine a torch out into the sky, so the light from the torch is traveling at the speed of light away from me, here standing on Earth, and then you, Brian, jump in a rocket and fly off at, say, 99 percent of the speed of light, trying to catch that light beam traveling parallel to it, I would see the light beam overtaking you, slowly at 1 percent of the speed of light, because you arent going nearly as fast as it and that also makes logical sense. But for you in the rocket, you see that same light beam going past you, at the same speed that I see it leaving my torch. So something has to give, and what gives is our notion of the flow of time.

I would see your time as running much more slowly than mine. Your seconds are ticking by slowly. Thats why you see the light beam going past you very quickly, because your time is running slower. One second for you, the light beam has gone past you very quickly, but for me I can see it creeping past. So the notions of distance and time change. And thats where relativity theory becomes counterintuitive and fun to teach.

Do you think we can know reality, the world out there, as it truly is, or is it more complicated than that?

This is an age-old question and it particularly came to the fore a century ago with the development of quantum mechanics: the most counterintuitive idea in science, the theory of the subatomic world. Famously there were long-running debates between the leading physicists of the time, Einstein versus the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Einstein was a realist. He believed theres a real world out there and its sciences job to get as close as we can to that truth. In The Joy of Science, I lay my cards on the table. I would side with Einstein on that one. We may never reach it, but the world is the way it is. We cant make up our own narrative. We cant decide on our own reality. But Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanicsthe guy was a geniuswould argue that the job of science isnt to find out how the world is, because we can never find out how it is. The job of science is to see what we can say based on what we see, our perception, of how the world is. We can never say how the world really is.

Do you feel like thats a cop out?

Yes. We should say theres a real world out there, and its our job to try and find ways of breaking out from the models that we create in our mindsthe reality that we construct in our mindsthat we hope reflects what the real world is like. I dont see any reason why we should absolve ourselves from that responsibility.

Why do you say that cognitive dissonance is far more serious in our modern culture and times than it has ever been?

Cognitive dissonance, the idea that well have a view and then well be confronted with something that goes completely against it, is something that happens to us on a daily basis. Pre-internet, we tended to read the newspaper or get our news from a source that we felt that aligned with our worldview. To a large extent, we still do that now, but what has changed is that the internet and social media and YouTube have amplified the problem, because we are now exposed to the opposing views in a very real way, far more than wed ever been before. Confirmation bias, you like to hear what you already believe in, was much easier in the past. Life was simpler.

Today we are confronted with having to deal with information coming from across the whole spectrum, for any particular issue, whether its political, ideological, or religious. And we adopt a defense mechanism against that, which is to reject the views that we dont like, that we dont agree with. And my argument is, Hang on. Dont be so hasty in rejecting it, however uncomfortable it makes you feel. Learn that theres no shame in changing your mind in the light of new information.

The term ideology comes up quite a bit in your book. Would you say people should generally avoid making ideological commitments if they want to think about things more scientifically?

I dont think so. Ideology can mean anything. Some people even refer to science as an ideology. There are certain beliefs in science, whether you believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or not, that become almost like an ideology. But no, this is part of human nature, that we have a worldview. We have a political view. We have a moral compass. We believe something is right and something is wrong. This changes, of course. What was acceptable a hundred years ago clearly isnt acceptable now and vice versa. So, holding ideological views is absolutely part of the human condition. Its just that we should try a bit harder to examine and question why we hold those ideological views and not be so certain, so absolute about them.

Why should we question our motives for believing what we think is true?

Its the way we do things in science. We constantly test our own ideas and because we know if we are wrong about something, other scientists eventually will discover it. Of course, some scientists will stick to their guns no matter what, but they dont last long. Those ideas dont survive very long. Just because you want something to be true or you want something to be correct, doesnt make it so. I think its a nice lesson that wider society could adopt. Being able to admit you are wrong, to change your mind, in science is a strength, unlike in politics, where its regarded as a weakness, right? Politicians dont like to admit mistakes or that theyre wrong. Wouldnt it be refreshing if they could say, Oh, actually. No, youve got a good point there. Ive changed my mind. I now think this.

Has your joy of science changed at all as youve gotten older and learned more?

Probably, it has increased rather than diminished. I dont feel theres going to come a time where I say, Okay, Im done with science. I want to go and play golf or travel around the world. I want to be able to do that, of course, but I dont think my love for science will diminish at all. I dont plan to retire, much to my wifes annoyance.

Brian Gallagher is an associate editor at Nautilus. Follow him on Twitter @bsgallagher.

Lead image: Intararit / Shutterstock

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Thinking Like a Scientist Will Make You Happier - Nautilus