Lattice, not through line

Living alongside the world’s only native black swans, Australians should be more alive to the provisional nature of truth than most. For thousands of years of European history, the ‘fact’ that ‘all swans are white’ was backed up with an overwhelming data set that only the delusional – or a philosopher – would debate. But as Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out, the difficulty with inductive reasoning is that it can seem incontrovertible all the way up until it is not. But if the truth is always shifting, where do we find solid ground when our lives depend on it? And to what absolutes and experts can we refer in an era of wilful misinformation, institutional mistrust, and anti-expert populism?

With bookshelves groaning under the weight of perfectly certain pop-science narratives, this ambitious new project from former biochemist and award-winning science writer Elizabeth Finkel is a much more nuanced and reflective thing. Its subtlety is somewhat belied by the title, but in Prove It: A scientific guide for the post-truth era Finkel has embarked on not yet another fact-fest, but a meta-dive into the often fraught and complicated method of ascertaining those facts.