Science, semi-science and nonsense

I was interested in one of your boundary detectors -- the intentional and unintentional distortion of facts. You use Holocaust deniers as an example of people who distort facts to fit their agenda. But did you ever think that there were Holocaust skeptics out there who didn't have some sort of agenda?

Yes, indeed. In fact, when I first met some of these guys, they seemed like pleasant, thoughtful people. And I thought, OK, these guys don't seem like raving anti-Semites. But then, when I got into it more, I saw that their motives were complex. I did listen pretty carefully; there were several nights that I went home thinking, Oh my God, maybe this whole thing was exaggerated. But if you probe deep enough, you really get to the core of it.

What do you do in that situation -- ask them very personal questions to see where they might be coming from?

Oh, yes. Particularly over beer and pizza. When they're off the record and chatting, that stuff tends to come out. And it does, you know, the stuff about the Jews. That kept coming up and I thought, aha, there really is something here. They all say that they're not David Irving and some of their best friends are Jewish and all that. However, then they continue, "but there's this cabal and those Jews and the media and the power" ... and it starts coming out.

What about Thomas Gold, the Deep Hot Biosphere guy? [Gold suggests that oil is not a fossil fuel but a by-product of massive amounts of bacteria living in rocks.] You said that no one thinks he's a crank. But no one necessarily believes in his theory. What's the shelf life for someone like that?

Here's a good example of science at work. It does matter who you are, at least initially. It gives you a hearing. Thomas Gold is a prominent scientist at Cornell and was right about enough big stuff.

In Hollywood, a studio can spend any amount of money they want on promoting a film. That will at most buy them about a week to a week and half of good sales. After that, it either sails or tanks on its own. Having a Nobel Prize or being a famous scientist will get you a week to a week and a half, metaphorically speaking, of a hearing for your new idea, but after that it's going to tank if you don't have the evidence and support for it.

A good example is the emergence of cold fusion. At the same time, in the spring of 1989, superconductivity really started to take off. Today, superconductivity continues to flourish -- it's a huge area of physics -- yet almost nobody is doing cold fusion. What happened? They were both exciting ideas, both proposed by prominent, respected scientists, but in the end, you have to have the evidence in corroboration or it's no good.

So it seems that scientists should have a certain background. They should submit to peer-reviewed journals. But there have to be mavericks out there who don't do these things.

Oh, there are. Freeman Dyson is huge, and he's completely self-taught. He didn't take the normal path at all. People like him are rarer now because science has become mechanized in its system of processing and producing scientists. Before World War II, there were lots of self-made scientists, but after that science became Big Science, it became government-funded and all the state universities started Ph.D. programs that produced Ph.D.s.

Creationists aren't scientists, but they do sometimes use science to support their idea, like the Rare Earth Theory, which states that what happened on Earth was unique in the universe. Where does that put them in the scheme of things?

They use whatever science they can find that they think supports their belief. But creationists don't actually do science. What they do is rummage through scientific journals and books and try to find holes in theories or find what looks like corroborative evidence for creation. That's not doing science. They're not trying to answer any questions about nature. They already have their answers and then they're trying to find evidence to support it.

Which violates a rule in your detector kit.

It's true that scientists are biased. They have agendas. You do go in search of evidence in favor of an idea that you like and that you were trained in under your professor. But again, with the checks and balances, you can't get away with that for very long.

Why do you consider ideas like objectivism -- Ayn Rand's doctrine that emphasizes individualism and self-interest -- or socialism to be borderlands science?

Most political and social systems are difficult to test scientifically because it quickly reduces to political philosophy. That's why America has a democracy -- we just vote on our personal preferences. People have tried rather unsuccessfully to marshal evidence for a particular political position, but it never seems to work very well. In that sense, I'm not terribly confident that political science is very scientific. Political scientists, when they do science, are measuring people's voting behavior. When they do that, they're being rigorous.

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