The Abuse of Science

In debates between scientists and creationists, it's frequent to hear the scientists piously state that science is immune from the human fallibilities and vagaries that part and parcel of religion. Of course that's not true. Scientists labor under the same kinds of human institutions that religious scholars and clergy do, and they face the same problems of preening ego, group conformity, submission to the hierarchy and repression. The good news is that the errors and mistakes that go uncorrected -- or suppressed by the orthodoxy of the day -- in the short run for scientists get ironed out over the course of decades and centuries. Truth really does eventually out. Excellent example: The Burgess Shale.

[A side joke: Galileo's ideas were universally accepted within a few decades of his publishing them. It only took the Catholic Church four centuries to apologise for suppressing them. The New York Times ridiculed Dr. Robert Goddard's widely published paper "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes" for its fanciful discussion of manned flights into space and to the moon. They have yet to publish a correction, nearly a century later.]

Which all leads to this article I stumbled across today. It's a personal view of how ideas, even in science, can be smothered by willful blindness.

The millions of man-hours that went into all that worldwide research have proved worthless in the pursuit of human progress. The main reason for this failure was the formulation of an establishment orthodoxy that prevented the publication of alternatives. In fact, when the intrinsic strength theory collapsed, it was immediately replaced by an equal and opposite, and equally banal, theory that all the phenomena were caused by sub-microscopic solid particle impurities. It again became difficult to publish results that disagreed with the new orthodoxy. The theorists felt secure in the knowledge that no one could make the measurements necessary to undermine their claims. It took me years of work to dispose of that one, and involved an elaborate computer aided experiment that measured the actual charges carried by randomly moving particles (femto-coulombs) and showed that they were many orders of magnitude too small to accommodate the theory. I spent a few more years knocking down theories, which in my Popperian view was the very stuff of science, but gradually moved over to the development of sensors that measured what needed to be measured, rather than relying of indirect deductions. Nevertheless, the general unease about the state of measurement science never left me and, in fact, grew. Most ominous was that fact that a new form of politics was emerging. Radicals of both the New Left and the New Right saw science not as an entity with its own integrity, but rather as a tool that they could bend to their own purposes.

The whole thing is quite short and the technical parts can be elided safely. It's the point of the article that bears keeping in mind.