Prove It – A Scientific Guide For The Post-Truth Era

Prove It – A Scientific Guide for the Post-Truth Era

By Ben Marshall

Posted on 30 August 2025

Elizabeth Finkel, is an Australian science journalist, author, and communicator. She was a biochemist for ten years, holding a PhD in the field, before she transitioned to science journalism.

In her latest book “Prove It – A Scientific Guide for the Post-Truth Era,” Finkel provides readers with a fascinating set of stories about how science works in some of the most contentious and controversial areas.

“What distinguishes science from conspiracy is that science rejects assertions that fail to clear the bar of evidence.”

It uncovers the truths about COVID’s origins, digs deep on whether medicine is science or art, looks at whether humans really originated in Africa, asks where the seat of our consciousness lies, and takes us to the ends of the universe to find the proofs for gravitational waves.

‘Prove It’ is, in short, brilliant, highly readable and incredibly relevant in an era where the President of the United States is shutting down scientific research, giving tyrannical powers over healthcare to an anti-vaxxer, and sacking anyone who speaks truth to power or who is insufficiently loyal.

As the disenfranchised margins of our cultures are lured by parasitic social media influencers, dazed by disinformation, and attracted to the certainties peddled by Newscorp and Far-right proxies for the corporate sector like the Advance Australia organisation, conspiracy theories are on the rise, and science is the enemy.

Vaccines, which save millions, are demonised as ‘deadly’, the science helping us understand climate is said to be a ‘hoax’, the inequities of global capital are ignored and replaced with claims of a secret ‘deep state’ and ‘global control by Jewish bankers’.

These beliefs are used by politicians on the Right to leverage their own agendas of power and influence, who wage war on science, claiming to supplant it with ‘choice’, ‘freedom from censorship’ and the primacy of ‘personal truth’ so that they, and only they can be trusted purveyors of truth.

Meanwhile, RFK Jnr is dismantling vaccine production and preparedness for the next pandemic. His delusional, anti-science dictates will cause deaths on a vast scale before he and his cronies are thrown out, and the US rediscovers science.

But where the US leads, Australia follows, so Finkel’s book couldn’t be more critical here in helping understand what science actually is and does, how it fails and how it will always self-correct.

You don’t have to ‘believe’ or trust science as the only ‘truth’, because science isn’t about proving things; science is about discovering better questions and evidence to challenge standing theory.

Truth is always conditional.

“Our health, our agriculture, our environmental safety, our ability to ameliorate and adapt to climate change, to regulate AI and to fight the next pandemic – all of these rely on our scientific system functioning as we know it must: through the generation of evidence, and rigorous testing of that evidence.”