Kate Becker
Kate Becker

How is politics like science?

Both thrive on disagreement: A politician distinguishes herself by all the ways in which her policy, experience, and personality diverge from her opponent's. Science advances when new data is at odds with an old hypothesis.

Both can be tools of progress: Smart policy choices can drive prosperity and equity. New scientific discoveries can lead to technologies that make our lives richer and healthier.

But the essential mechanism of democratic politics -- the vote -- is anathema to science.

Take the case of a tiny something circling the star Fomalhaut, about 25 light-years from Earth. In 2008, astronomers announced that that something was a new exoplanet, about the mass of Jupiter and orbiting in the distant reaches of its home solar system. Most exciting of all, they claimed that they had imaged it directly.

Unlike all the exoplanets that came before, whose presence could be mathematically inferred but not actually seen in a visible light snapshot, the new planet, Fomalhaut b, was right there before our eyes: a bright speck traveling along the edge of the vast, dusty ring around the star Fomalhaut.

Not everyone was convinced. But no one put it to a vote: Instead, both the believers and the naysayers went out in search of further evidence. Astronomers using the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope couldn't find a trace of Fomalhaut b, even though the planet was expected to shine brighter in infrared light than in visible light.


When, in follow-up studies, the leader of the discovery team found that the would-be planet had taken an unexpected turn into the dust disk, critics argued that the planet must be a mirage: If such an object truly were passing through the disk, the edge of the disk wouldn't be so sharply defined. The "planet," it seemed, was just a clot of dust.

But the search for Fomalhaut b continued.

Now, a new look at the original Hubble Space Telescope observations suggests that the planet is no illusion. By subtracting the bright light from the center star Fomalhaut from the images, a team of astronomers has teased out a stronger signal than ever.

Once consigned to the scientific dustbin, Fomalhaut b is back -- but with a twist. The new analysis suggests that the object astronomers thought they were seeing isn't actually the planet itself, but starlight reflected off a cloud that surrounds it. For the discovery team, it's a good news/bad news story: Their planet looks more real than ever, but they've lost bragging rights to the first directly imaged exoplanet.

In the vocabulary of politics, this is a win for one camp and a loss for another. But in the vocabulary of science -- at least when it operates as its "best self" -- it is a win for all. The often-adversarial process of proving and disproving, and proving again, brings us all closer to a truer understanding of our universe.

I often think that the cosmos -- with its now-you-see-it-now-you-don't planets, its mysterious dark matter and dark energy, its invisible, churning black holes -- embodies the hardest problems we human beings will ever solve.

And yet, with Election Day looming, the problems of the cosmos begin to seem quaint. After all, even if the answers are decades or centuries off, at least we can agree that the scientific method is a pretty good way of discovering them. When it comes to politics, it seems, we can't even do that much. Do we vote with our brains, our hearts, our faith, our pocketbooks? Are we voting for people or parties? Do we thrive when we take care of ourselves, or when we take care of each other?

Yet we don't have the luxury of waiting for the next round of data to come in before picking a side, and with each vote we change the conditions of the experiment. Science is not democratic, and democracy is not scientific: We can only hope that our vote makes our corner of the cosmos a little bit better.
