In Popularizing Science, Peter Woit ponders, by means of three questions, the value of scientists catering to the public to try and generate interest in science. He writes:
While it’s not one of my main goals in life, I’m all in favor of the idea of popularizing science and making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. But sometimes I do wonder about the kind of things scientists get involved with when they try and do this.
One of his questions stands out in particular because it highlights the difference between hard science and soft/pseudo science, and it shows that Woit is only willing to attack the establishment line so much; after all, he’s an establishment player with establishment credentials from a top tier university, Princeton, and he works at a top tier university, Columbia.
He asks his first question, and this question is related to another establishment player, Sean Carrol, who obtained credentials and employment from two other top tier universities, Harvard and Cal Tech. Woit asks:
Is it a good idea for physicists to appear on a radio show discussing what happened before the big bang, or does the lack of any evidence about this or of a convincing model mean that this is just inherently too speculative a topic to be sold as serious science to a wide audience? Should one perhaps leave this topic to the Bogdanovs?
At this point, I’ll start reading between the lines. For one, as I read it, Woit considers the claim about the Big Bang as hard science (serious science), but any claims about events prior to the supposed Big Bang, he considers those purely speculative.
I’d like to point out here that “Big Bang science” ain’t the same kind of science as the type that’s used to make microwave ovens, send space probes to Mars, and do all those other amazing, real-world feats that are accomplished by real-world scientists and engineers.
But Woit only wants to complain about people wanting to make more claims about what can’t be seen. The Big Bang, though it wasn’t observed to have happened, that’s fine, but what hasn’t been seen prior to what hasn’t been seen, that’s bad. One unseen is okay, but two? That’s bad. We can’t have two unseens, just one.
Well, I don’t want to complain about Woit too much because there are others who are much worse, with the worse being those who are guilty of generating the speculation and passing it off as science, such as Sean. Woit is only guilty of tempering his language to try and keep from being written off by the establishment; he knows that credentials only you so far when a whole lot of other people, people who aren’t interested in rocking the boat, have equally weighty credentials.
So, when Sean constantly pushes philosophy off as science, and when many others are receptive to it, there’s only so much a man like Woit can do if he wants to maintain his establishment credibility.
And here’s Sean pushing in Quirks and Quarks: Before the Big Bang, the post linked to by Woit.
Listen here. As we’ve talked about on this very blog, the time is right to push our understanding of the universe back before the Big Bang and ask what was really happening. Current ideas are understandably vague, but the only way to improve them is to keep exploring.
This king of talk is amazing to me, because prior to this Sean quotes the following from Before the Big Bang, an article promoting a radio broadcast that he took part in.
The Big Bang theory of the origin of our universe is widely accepted by the physics community. The idea that our universe started out as some infinitesimally small point, which expanded out to what we see today, makes a lot of sense. Except for one small thing. That initial point, called a singularity by physicists, is a physical impossibility. According to the models we have today, the temperature of the universe at that first moment would have had to be infinite, which mathematically makes no sense. Also, the singularity doesn’t do a good job of explaining where all the matter and energy we see today in the universe came from. So, physicists are increasingly starting to look at other branches of physics to see what they can do to replace the singularity with a more reasonable proposition, one which can actually be explained by existing science.
It’s amazing. They admit that there are major problems with the Big Bang theory, but they do so without feeling any need whatsoever to concede that the Big Bang is not hard science.
Again, Seans says, “the time is right to push our understanding of the universe back before the Big Bang and ask what was really happening,” which is to say that he and others have a good understanding of the universe starting with the Big Bang, but then he says, “Current ideas are understandably vague…,” which is to say that he and others don’t understand the universe starting with the Big Bang, and then he adds, “but the only way to improve them is to keep exploring,” which is to say that making assumptions, doing interpolations, and adding a bunch of logic is as scientifically respectable as sending space probes to Mars and as respectable as collecting data when particles are smashed together.
I used to think that I needed heavyweight credentials to try and debunk soft/pseudo science claims, but people like Sean have gotten so far out of the realm of science that if a simple argument is not sufficient to convince others that this type of soft/pseudo science is nonsense, then people who accept this type of nonsense want to believe nonsense.
And people do want to believe this nonsense. Do you have a Ph.D. from Princeton and work at Columbia? It’s not enough to combat people like Sean who has a Ph.D. from Harvard and works at Cal Tech. And commenter Dragon of Woit’s post is an example of what can happen when one establishment player makes a mild, negative suggestion about another establishment player. Dragon writes:
Comparing Carroll, Steinhardt, Khoury, and Brandenberger with the Bogdanovs doesn’t really do a lot for your own credibility. In fact it looks very much like the kind of thing that Lubos Motl would say.
Obviosly, Woit is not like crazy Lubos.
But this is what can happen when you rock the establishment boat, even when you have big establishment credentials. People like this commenter, whom I can imagine is doing his best to kiss as much establishment butt to get tenure, or who got tenure by making sure he conformed to the norm and who now enjoys smacking down others in the tenure process who don’t conform, or who at least dreams of doing one or the other, but when you rock the establishment boat, you take the risk of the collective-weight-of-establishment-credentials coming down on you.
But back to Woit’s complaint about scientists catering to the public, with the end result being that, in the process of such catering, soft science ends up being represented as hard science.
In the comment section, Woit is more assertive. First, Coin writes:
On points one and two, I would say that the answer is sure, as long as the physicists in question are unambiguous about exactly how speculative their responses are.
And Woit responds:
Coin,
One problem is that I’ve never once seen a physicist discussing highly speculative work in the media accurately explain how speculative it was. Even if people do make disclaimers like this to reporters, that’s the kind of thing that ends up getting cut in whatever appears.
Related to all of the above, I’d like to ask two questions of my own.
- Why does the general public want to hear soft/pseudo science claims represented as science?
- And why does the science community allow soft/pseudo science claims to be represented as science?
I think both questions can be summarized as “they don’t care.”
Much of the general public doesn’t care about accuracy, they just want to hear what they want to hear.
And the bulk of the science community doesn’t care to oppose what’s been accepted by consensus, regardless of accuracy, because to do so would require risk on their part, and probably payback in some manner.
Filed under: Logically extended science, Science
