Over in Twitter-land, S. C. Kavassalis notes a Googler who’s not afraid to ask the big questions:
Weird Google search of the week: ‘the “one” scientific idea that we need to believe’. Uh um, I’m sure my blog couldn’t possibly answer that.
It’s a good question, though, ad there are a couple of different ways to take it. You could read it as “What one scientific idea is supported by the most experimental proof?” or you could read it as “What one idea is most central to science generally?”
“The Standard Model” was quickly suggested on Twitter, which could fit either. I think it might be stretching the definition of “one” idea a bit, though I admit I’m not sure what to do with the quotes around “one” in the original query. You can certainly claims all sorts of experimental verification for the component parts of the Standard Model, though. (In some ways, it’s too well verified– theorists have been hoping for experimental evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model for decades, but it’s pretty thin.) And you can, in principle, derive the rest of science from the Standard Model, though I wouldn’t want to try it.
If you want to put tighter limits on the meaning of “‘one’ idea,” and lean toward the second reading of the question, it’s really hard to top Feynman:
If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence you will see an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
He’s right that there’s a huge amount of information there. Asking how atoms assemble into larger objects gets you directly into chemistry, condensed matter physics, and materials science. Asking what atoms are made of gets you into atomic physics, and then into nuclear and particle physics. You probably could reconstruct most of modern science starting with that fact as Received Wisdom of the Ancients. I don’t know if anybody has done a latter-day Canticle for Leibowitz using that as part of the background, but it might be amusing.
I’m sure somebody out there will at least think they can do better, though, so have it it. What one scientific idea do we need to believe?