Saul Perlmutter teaches everyone to think like a scientist

Person: Saul Perlmutter
Lived: b. 1959
Field: Astrophysics
From: American

The story

Saul Perlmutter, the Berkeley astrophysicist who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that the universe's expansion is accelerating, grew up in a Jewish family of teachers and professors in Philadelphia; his grandfather was a self-taught scholar and teacher of Yiddish literature. Over his career he came to believe that science's real strength lies less in its facts than in its habits of thought, ways of checking ideas that scientists usually learn only through years of apprenticeship.

In 2011 he began working with the Berkeley philosopher John Campbell and the social psychologist Robert MacCoun on a way to teach those habits to everyone. The result was a team-taught Big Ideas course at the University of California, Berkeley, known as Sense and Sensibility and Science. It teaches students the ideas and tools that natural and social scientists use to understand the world, and shows how useful those approaches are in everyday life, both for individuals and for groups trying to make decisions together, including with people who hold different values.

In March 2024 the three published Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, turning the course into a book for general readers. It sets out the tools scientists use to stop themselves from fooling themselves, such as thinking in probabilities rather than certainties and actively looking for their own mistakes, and applies them to everyday problems and to decisions that whole communities must make together.

Perlmutter argues that science's superpower comes from what might look like weakness: being willing to be wrong, being only probabilistically sure of facts, and seeking out people who disagree, because they are the best chance of finding one's mistakes. In an age of misinformation, he believes, those tools belong to every citizen, not just to researchers. As a graduate student, he has said, he learned how the culture of science allows people to stick with hard problems much longer than most humans ordinarily would.

Why it matters

The course, book and school materials give students and general readers practical tools for judging evidence and making decisions in a world full of misinformation.

About Saul Perlmutter

Berkeley astrophysicist whose team found the universe’s expansion is speeding up, revealing dark energy, and who now teaches the public how to think like scientists. Nobel Prize 2011.

Read the full profile

Saul Perlmutter

b. 1959 · Astrophysics

View profile →