I love giving lectures to university students. I also love asking them this question: "In all of human history, how many scientific theories do you estimate have been proven true?"
The answer is zero. The Scientific Method cannot prove any theory true. All it can prove is that a theory has not been proven wrong yet.
You can drop a billion balls that fall exactly as Newton's laws predict. That doesn't prove Newton's correct. If one falls up, Newton is wrong. "That's all there is to it."
It's bad enough when college students don't fundamentally understand the Scientific Method. It's truly frightening when the lead voice on the COVID pandemic response doesn't.
Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that no COVID deaths were recorded in Texas for Sunday, May 16. This is fantastic news for Texas and Texans.
It also shows that emperor Dr. Fauci has no clothes. Dr. Fauci predicted results that were exactly the opposite of what happened in Texas. He wasn't just wrong; he was completely wrong. His ball fell up.
It's long past time to stop listening to Dr. Fauci and his wrong predictions. I declare Sunday, May 16 Texas's "Fauci Freedom Day": the day that Texas officially declared itself free from Fauci's faulty predictions and his complete disregard for the Scientific Method.
First, the facts. When Governor Abbott announced that on March 10, he would end the Texas mask mandate and open businesses 100 percent, on cue, the mainstream propaganda media and the government medical complex predicted impending doom.
Typical of that response was Dr. Fauci's totally incorrect "scientific" prediction:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious diseases expert, has a warning for states that are dropping coronavirus restrictions as the number of cases continues to fall.
"It's certainly from a public health standpoint ill-advised," Fauci told CNN's Erin Burnett, adding that past declines in the number of COVID-19 cases also prompted states to move too quickly to reopen.
"We had rebounds which were very troublesome," Fauci said. "What we don't need right now is another surge."
Later in the interview, Dr, Fauci disagreed with calling existing COVID- 19 restrictions "arbitrary":
"They're not arbitrary," he said. "They're based on evidence and data from science. We know that these interventions work, it's very clear: When you implement them, you see the cases go down. When you pull back, the cases go up."
Not only was Dr. Fauci saying in early March, "When you pull back (interventions), the cases go up." He was also saying his opinion was "based on evidence and data from science." So when his "science-based" prediction was wrong, did Dr. Fauci follow the Scientific Method?
No. He did not. As they say, he doubled down on stupid.
On Tuesday, April 6th, appearing on MSNBC, Dr. Anthony Fauci still would not concede that Texas was correct in letting Texans' lives get back to normal despite cases and hospitalizations from COVID-19 plunging in the state after it "reopened 100%" with no statewide mask mandate on March 10. Fauci stated, "We've been fooled before by situations where people begin to open up, nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, several weeks later, things start exploding on you.
I certainly believe that Dr. Fauci has "been fooled before". When faced with dramatically falling Texas cases, that directly contradicted Dr. Fauci's month earlier prediction of cases rising, he created the nonsensical excuse that I am completely wrong now, but maybe I'll be right in the future. If he truly understood the Scientific Method, some mythical future doesn't matter. His data- and science-based prediction was wrong now, on April 6.
The Scientific Method is brutally clear about what Dr. Fauci needed to do immediately, and he didn't do it.
What is the Scientific Method, and how did Dr. Fauci fundamentally violate it?
From Wikipedia:
The scientific method is an iterative, cyclical process through which information is continually revised. It is generally recognized to develop advances in knowledge through the following elements, in varying combinations or contributions:
Characterizations (observations, definitions, and measurements of the subject of inquiry)
Hypotheses (theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations and measurements of the subject)
Predictions (inductive and deductive reasoning from the hypothesis or theory)
Experiments (tests of all of the above)
Note that Dr. Fauci's March 4 conversation had all of the above elements.
Characterizations — "They're [his predictions] based on evidence and data from science."
Hypotheses — "When you implement them [interventions], you see the cases go down. When you pull back, the cases go up."
Predictions — "When you [Texas] pull back, the cases go up."
Experiment — "We know that these interventions work, it's very clear," presumably from past pandemics.
So on March 4, Dr. Fauci's statement was consistent with the Scientific Method to predict that cases would go up in Texas if they stopped following his guidelines. Not true — consistent.
His predictions remind me of the old joke where a man falls off the roof of a hundred-story building. When asked by a horrified man on his fiftieth-floor balcony, "My goodness, How's it going?," the falling man replies, "So far, so good."
So far, so good for Dr. Fauci's March statements and the Scientific Method.
By his April 6 statement, like the falling man Dr. Fauci hit bottom. His entire hypotheses and predictions had been proven wrong. The experimental data showed conclusively that exactly the opposite of what his "science" predicted had occurred. Cases dropped. The ball fell up.
The Scientific Method dictates only one possible action that Dr. Fauci could have done in April. Admit that your fundamental model of how diseases spread is fatally flawed and that, literally, you have to go back to the drawing board. Dr. Fauci didn't do that. He tried to hand- wave and distract to the effect that maybe he'd be right in the future. That is totally irrelevant to his failures in the present. His disease transmission worldview was wrong then. And now.
A brilliant physicist and Nobel laureate put it best when talking about hypotheses and predictions (appropriately called "guesses") in this one- minute video, "The Scientific Method." Richard Feymann states:
If it [your prediction] disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. That's all there is to it.
Dr. Fauci's "science"-based prediction was that the number of Texas cases would rise when in fact the experimental data showed they fell. Whatever Dr. Fauci's theories of disease transmission were, the predictions based on them were wrong. Therefore, his theories are wrong.
Until Dr. Fauci can explain why his fundamental theory of disease transmission and his predictions based on them were wrong, no one should listen to him.
Way to go, Texas, but it's long past time for Fauci Freedom Day for the entire country. That's all there is to it.