by Ethan Johnson
October 15, 2007

While on a quest to understand how energy/eletricity is harnessed and used to power our various creature comforts, I stumbled upon a page that chronicles some of the crackpot theories of yore that are now widely accepted as fact. From the introduction:

While it's true that at least 99% of revolutionary announcements from the fringes of science are just as bogus as they seem, we cannot dismiss every one of them without any investigation. If we do, then we'll certainly take our place among the ranks of scoffers who dismissed (or even accidentally helped to suppress) a large number of major scientific discoveries throughout history. Beware! Today many discoveries such as powered flight and drifting continents only appear sane and acceptable to us because we have such powerful HINDsight. These same advancements were seen as obviously a bunch of disgusting lunatic garbage during the times they were first discovered.

For example:

[Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar] originated Black Hole theory and published several papers. He was attacked viciously by his close colleague Sir Arthur Eddington, and his theory was discredited in the eyes of the research community. They were wrong, and Eddington apparently took such strong action based on an incorrect pet theory of his own. In the end Chandra could not even pursue a career in England, and he moved his research to the U. of Chicago in 1937, laboring in relative obscurity for decades. Others rediscovered Black Hole theory thirty years later. He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics, major recognition only fifty years. Never underestimate the authority-following tendency of the physics community, or the power of ridicule when used by people of stature such as Eddington.

As noted above, Eddington was working on something approaching a Grand Unifying Theory, which became his undoing. From the Wikipedia article devoted to Eddington:

A particularly damaging statement in his defence of these concepts involved the fine structure constant [symbol]. At the time it was measured to be very close to 1/136, and he argued that the value should in fact be exactly 1/136 for various reasons. Later measurements placed the value much closer to 1/137, at which point he switched his line of reasoning and claimed that the value should in fact be exactly 1/137, the Eddington number. Wags at the time started calling him "Arthur Adding-one". At this point most other researchers stopped taking his concepts very seriously.

I mention this because from time to time, I become annoyed with the cock-sure braying of the "skeptic" community, who seems to miss no opportunity to bash astrology, homeopathy, chiropractors, accupuncture, psychics, ghosts, telepathy, and on and on. Like the author of my opening quote noted, a number approaching 100% of these claims are crap. But "crap" seems to be relative. Theories concerning the human circulatory system were once dismissed as crap. Galileo's use of the telescope was dismissed as crap. Interestingly, not solely by the Church, which is often reviled for the persecution of Galileo, but other astronomers, who didn't want to refute Aristotle.

This does not give the practitioners of bona fide crap a free pass to continue to deceive the public and ply their trade as charlatans. Quite the contrary. But what concerns me is the vigor with which certain skeptics dismiss that which lies outside the realm of accepted theory, which, upon consideration, is quite plentiful. These skeptics laud Science (the practice) for its adaptability, as opposed to more rigid religious fundamentalism.

As for the science vs. "faith" debate, I agree with the skeptic crowd that unlike, say, the discovery of the Doppler effect or rockets, the credulity displayed by many who flock to alleged appearances of [religious figure here] - usually in the form of a stain or a smudge that "looks like" that religious figure - is disheartening. Not to mention the uncritical acceptance of "God" and the knee-jerk willingness to attribute a great many things to "him". Skeptical folk do well to point out that this credulity and acceptance is not generally grounded in direct observation, or testable hypotheses. As one of my math teachers complained, I was correct that 10x10 was in fact 100, but I didn't show my work, and therefore did not demonstrate that I knew how 10x10 came to equal 100. Same goes for people who attribute a great many things to "God". Perhaps they are 100% correct. But how do they know? Faith is one thing, wild guesses are another.

But the thing is, less than 1% of these grandiose, even revolutionary claims are in fact accurate. What I have found in time is that Science is no more a stranger to demogoguery than the average religion. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar wasn't rebuked by the Church for his theories concerning black holes, he had a fellow scientist for that. Robert Goddard wasn't rebuked by the Church for inventing rockets, he had the New York Times for that.

The full weight of scorn, however, was reserved for the lunar proposal: "after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey it will neither be accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that." It expressed disbelief that Professor Goddard actually "does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react" and even talked of "such things as intentional mistakes or oversights." Goddard, the Times declared, apparently suggesting bad faith, "only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

To their credit, the Times offered a correction many years later:

Forty nine years afterwards, on July 17, 1969, the day after the launch of Apollo 11, the New York Times published a short item under the headline "A Correction," summarizing its 1920 editorial mocking Goddard, and concluding: "Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error."

Reading through the list of ridiculed scientific discoveries, and cross-checking the anecdotes, what strikes me is the ability of Science to assimilate new ideas in such a way as to pave over the great unpleasantness of say, Goddard's dismissal by the Times, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar's dismissal by his more popular colleague, or Lynn Margulis' dismissal by the National Science Foundation. If resistance in the face of scientific advancement gets much play at all, a cursory glance suggests that this is purely reserved for the Church, to illustrate how the religious fear hard science. Sadly, human nature remains constant, by and large, and the same forces that bring about persecution and condemnation in religious terms are not far removed from the same treatment in and from the scientific community.

After all, who dares refute Darwin? Or Einstein? <EM>