Faith Based Science

Science for Conservatives

I was browsing the web site of a former Harvard prof, when I noticed a key scientific paradigm shift. It assorted rather nicely with the ads the site carries for ESP, refutations of Einstein's relativity, etc.

The core of the paradigm shift is the recognition of a fundamental principle of Republican science - the need to free oneself from the tyranny of those pesky facts. The trouble with physics, says our prof, is a dependence on some "myths," four of them which he mentions. Most are inoffensively trivial, like number two:

Myth: If I cannot settle or understand a question, no one else can do it either.

Now I can't recall meeting anyone quite that arrogant, and I suspect that this particular myth is believed in by fewer adults than believe in the tooth fairy, but maybe somebody does believe it. Three and four are similar.

Myth number one is more substantial:

Myth: Reliable answers to questions about Nature can only be obtained by a direct experiment or observation.

To be sure, there is a lot of wiggle room in that word "direct." Once again, though, I doubt that many scientists would subscribe to that "myth" under the most restrictive interpretation of the word direct. I suspect, though, and both history and the author's subsequent arguments indicate that he has something else in mind: the notion that an otherwise unsupported theory can be considered tested if it is derived from well tested theories. We are talking string theory here, people, even though it isn't mentioned in the post.

Let's hear from the author though:

If two phenomena are related and if they can be proven to follow the same laws with the same accuracy, it really means that if we know the structure of one of them, we also know the structure of the other one. On the other hand, it doesn't follow that both of these phenomena are equally difficult to be observed or measured experimentally. The similarity of the underlying structure and the similar "ease" of verification are two different things.

How, I wonder, if you can't test one of them, can you decide that "they follow the same laws with the same accuracy." The history of the standard model in particular, and of physics in general, is full of inspired guesses that turned out to be correct. Even more common are the guesses that turned out to be wrong. For exactly that reason, physicists from Galileo to Feynman maintained that experiment was the only trustworthy arbiter.

A few string theorists, though, demoralized by the grim prospects for any foreseeable tests of their theory, are advocating the long discredited Aristotelian notion of deducing physics by pure thought.

Call me a skeptic.