Howard Burton - Science and Pseudoscience: A Conversation with Michael Gordin

Years ago, when I found myself in charge of a theoretical physics institute, I used to receive a steady stream of letters and emails from highly frustrated, would-be-scientific revolutionaries, anxious to tell me about their work.

Typically, they would explain how the scientific community had rejected them out of hand on sociological grounds, simply because their work went too far against the prevailing orthodoxy. Often they would compare their circumstancesif not themselvesto those of Einstein, struggling away in secret with his transformative ideas about the universe while working at a Swiss patent office. Inevitably, too, it might bear mentioning, they were all men.

I quickly learned that any physicist who has ever been in any position of authority anywhere has received a significant number of such letters. The most common response is to simply ignore them. My approach was always to write back a short reply thanking them for their time and effort, but explaining that I didnt have the time to go through their work in proper detail. If they had, indeed, found some transformative insight, I responded evenly, I urged them to formally submit their results to the appropriate journals for consideration like everybody else.

Of course, this was somewhat duplicitous. I knew very well that the reason they had approached me (in addition to virtually anyone else they could find an email address for) was that no established journal would ever seriously consider wading through their invariably dense wad of notes, let alone publishing it.

What passed for a certain form of politeness, then, was hardly anything that justified my place on a higher moral planelike everyone else, I, too, hoped that these fringe figures would just go away and leave me alone.

Yet, in the back of my mind, I always wondered. Not, as it happens, that their claims of possessing a revolutionary insight might turn out to be correctI am sceptical enough to believe that the chances of that happening were, statistically, vanishingly smallbut more sociologically speaking: what keeps these people going, day after day, perpetually encountering an unequivocal wall of rejection, if not outright hostility, from the scientific authorities? Why wilfully remain mired on the outside of the big tent of science? After all, the global scientific effort is quite different now than it was more than a century ago in Einsteins day. For anyone anxious to make some sort of a contribution to the scientific effort, there is always somewhere that will accept you to at least do an undergraduate degree, if not a PhD.

The cynical answer is that they are all simply crazy and dont have the intellectual resources necessary to make their way through even the most basic technical material, let alone a doctoral program somewhere. But something about that response always struck me as being too pat. Doubtless it was the case for some. But likely not all.

So it was with a particular interest that I picked up Michael Gordins intriguing book, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. I am old enough to (just barely) remember the name Immanuel Velikovsky, the charismatic rebel who wrote (among others) the bestselling book Worlds in Collision that managed to provocatively combine unbridled scientific speculation with ancient myth.

By all accounts, Velikovsky was a decidedly curious character. The notorious Russian-born doctorturned psychoanalystturned astronomer-historian-autodidact not only had a flair for writing and boatloads of charisma and energy, he also was on record for making a couple of concrete predictions of his radical new theory of the solar system that turned out, much to the dismay of the authorities of the day, to actually be correct.

Here, then, was a specific, compelling, historical instance that could be carefully studied to examine how science had deliberately separated itself from pseudoscience, and why.

The full story of Immanuel Velikovsky turns out to be even more fascinating than one might expect, combining elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, Cold War paranoia, ancient mythology, NASA press conferences, 1960s counterculture and a good deal more besides. Its not too hard to see why Michael, as a professional historian of science, would pick such a captivatingly good yarn.

But to me, always lurking in the background were the broader issues: How do we distinguish science from pseudoscience?Howshouldwe? Is science too conservative? Too liberal? Can we improve its process? Can we learn from the past?

So when I got the chance to catch up with Michael face to face, I was anxious to steer the conversation towards those more general questions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out that he was as well.

One of the first things he wanted to mention was that, in stark contrast to contemporary scientific dogma, Karl Poppers famous falsifiability criterion is hardly the magic bullet to meaningfully distinguish science from pseudoscience.

Its a very appealing criterion. Except its got a couple of problems. The first problem is, How do you know that you falsified something? If it were the case that every time an experiment with a null result meant that youd falsified something, then everything we know about physics and chemistry will be wrong because high school students around the world have failed to replicate it. So you have to do the experiment right. But how do you know youve done the experiment right, unless you get the right result?

The second problem is that any valuable demarcation criterion has to cut the world in the right place: we want to make sure that all the things that we regard as science are scientific, and those things that we think of as fringe or pseudo are not. It should divide that well. The problem is that there are lots of sciences which have a very hard time coming up with falsifying instancesin particular, the historically-engaged sciences like evolutionary theory, geology, cosmology and so forth. You cant rerun the tape. If someone tells you, The universe was created this way, and you respond, Well, but whats the falsifiable statement? its awfully hard to find one.