Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:
- A wire-service story about superstition, a manifestation of anti-science
- Science supporters' criticisms of George F. Will for supporting science
- A pair of New York Times articles engaging questions about science's special authority
- A Washington Post columnist's views about future high-tech warfare
- A New York Times article about a disappointment for dark-energy researchers
- The climate-denier George F. Will's strong advocacy of federal research spending.
Science versus anti-science, continued
Consider a brief wire-service article in the New York Times that never actually mentions science or anti-science. It begins this way:
CHITILA, Romania (AP)—Everyone curses the taxman, but Romanian witches, angry about having to pay up for the first time, hurled poisonous mandrake into the Danube River on Thursday to cast spells on the president and government.
In the past, the less mainstream professions of witch, astrologer and fortuneteller were not listed in the Romanian labor code, and people who worked in those jobs used their lack of registration to evade paying income tax. Under a new law, they will pay 16 percent income tax and make contributions to health and pension programs, like other self-employed people.
A witch named Alisia, who was at the protest on the Danube, called the new tax law "foolish."
"Professions of witch, astrologer and fortuneteller"? Maybe dedicated supporters of science and rationality should scold the wire service and the Times for seeming to accept the notion that humans can have supernatural powers, and for failing to place the word witch inside scare quotes. Or maybe the piece should be let off on grounds of whimsy.
And maybe it contributes a small amount of context to the science versus anti-science discussion. In any case, it goes on to describe Romania's politics of superstition, and eventually mentions a "witch" who plans "to cast a spell using a particularly effective concoction of cat excrement and a dead dog." She reportedly warned, "We do harm to those who harm us."
One last thing: In case anyone sees this media report as unfairly singling out Romania, I can also report that one of the US national papers the other day ran a quite similar feature on the resurgence of superstition in America.
George Will, climate anti-science, and anti-science generally
Two questions that some scientists will find distasteful, but that might be useful anyway:
- 1. Does George F. Will's hostile rejection of the climate consensus disqualify him from supporting federal funding for science generally?
- 2. Does anger at Will for his aggressive climate denial justify charging, without evidence, that his climate anti-science constitutes a general pattern of anti-science?
As discussed in an earlier report this week, Will forcefully advocated federal research spending and the principles of the "Gathering Storm" reports in his 2 January Washington Post column. At least three attacks on him have ensued.
In the spirit of Question 1 above, a Washington Post letter observes, "Given Mr. Will's many columns attacking the scientific consensus on global warming, one wonders why he believes there is a need for additional effort in the sciences." Will—the letter asserts as it inches toward Question 2 as well—"shouldn't call for a science stimulus package while acting like a demagogue with regard to the results that science produces."
At the New York Times online, Question 1 permeates an Andrew Revkin Dot Earth blog posting where, as in the Post letter, Question 2 begins to come up. Revkin charges that Will has "spent many columns attacking science." That's true for climate science, of course, but has Will denied evolution? Advocated vaccine boycotts? Charged that the Large Hadron Collider portends planetary doom? Revkin cites not a single non-climate-related attack on science.
But he does declare Joe Romm's "deconstruction" of Will's column "well worth reading." Romm has an MIT physics PhD, served in the Clinton Energy Department, and holds a fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At his Climate Progress blog, that deconstruction carries this headline and thumbnail summary, calling to mind both Question 1 and Question 2:
Hypocrite of the year: Anti-science George Will bemoans decline of U.S. scienceLeading science denier now writes "the nation depends on nourishing [scientists] and the institutions that sustain them."
Romm charges that Will attacks science and scientists and that he "has done as much as anyone else to undermine the national consensus that once existed for" science and engineering research. But Romm offers no actual evidence about science or scientists outside climate science—or about engineering at all.
Obviously the Washington Post letter writer, Revkin, and Romm expect readers to accept a conflation of anti-climate-science with anti-science generally. Obviously they judge that Will's secular heresy on climate absolutely corrupts everything that he does, says, or writes.
Here's one possible Question 3: Whether or not citizens generally should share that judgment, do they?
New York Times reports science-abuse questions
Two articles in the 6 January New York Times engage questions of the abuse of science's special authority.
The Times blurbs one of them this way: "A prominent research psychologist's claim of proof of extrasensory perception is already mortifying scientists." The article appears on the front page below the fold under the headline "Top Journal Plans to Publish a Paper on ESP, and Psychologists Sense Outrage." Note the play on the word sense. The online headline makes a similar double-entendre play on the word premonition: "Premonitions of Outrage Over Journal's ESP Paper."
The opening paragraphs convey the gist:
One of psychology's most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.
The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.
The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.
The article reports the views of researchers who believe the report deserves publication, including the journal editor. But there's also this:
[O]thers insist that [the paper's] acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.
"It's craziness, pure craziness. I can't believe a major journal is allowing this work in," Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. "I think it's just an embarrassment for the entire field."
The article later notes that Hyman also said, "I wouldn't rule out that this is an elaborate joke." Whatever it is, the article reports on how it was carried out, including questions about the study's statistics.
There's no joking or fabricating of double entendres in the Times's second article, a wire-service piece that the Times headlined "Study Linking Vaccine to Autism Is Called Fraud." It's probably best to summarize by quoting not the wire-service piece but this blurb from the journal BMJ , which is the source of information for the news:
In the first part of a special BMJ series, Brian Deer exposes the data behind claims that launched a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and reveals how the appearance of a link with autism was manufactured at a London medical school. In an accompanying editorial, Fiona Godlee and colleagues say that Andrew Wakefield's article linking MMR vaccine and autism was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud. In a linked blog [on the BMJ website], Brian Deer analyses the similarities between the MMR scare and the case of the "Piltdown Man."
Key excerpts from that BMJ editorial require quoting. There's this one about the certainty of the fraud:
Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children's cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross.
And to sum up, there are these two excerpts, assessing consequences of the controversy overall:
Meanwhile the damage to public health continues, fuelled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals, and the medical profession. Although vaccination rates in the United Kingdom have recovered slightly from their 80% low in 2003-4, they are still below the 95% level recommended by the World Health Organization to ensure herd immunity. In 2008, for the first time in 14 years, measles was declared endemic in England and Wales. Hundreds of thousands of children in the UK are currently unprotected as a result of the scare, and the battle to restore parents' trust in the vaccine is ongoing. . . . .
[P]erhaps as important as the scare's effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion, and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it.
Washington Post column: physics and future warfare
Although it's not clear that the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius got all of the physics realities and nuances right, his recent piece advocating a national focus on future warfare methods, including directed-energy weaponry, may merit attention.
Ignatius begins by describing a light-bulb moment listening to a Chinese defense expert in Shanghai:
[H]e wasn't expressing a pipe dream about building a blue-water navy to challenge U.S. dominance in the Pacific. Instead, he was talking about the irrelevance of traditional land and sea power in the dawning age of combat—when weapons will include cyberattacks, space weapons, lasers, pulses and other directed-energy beams. . . . With a laser weapon fired from space, "any ship will be burned."
Ignatius adds that just "as gunpowder, cannons, airplanes, rockets and nuclear power changed the face of combat, so, too, will a new generation of weapons on the drawing boards—not just in America but also in China, India and other advanced technological nations." He reports that last year, "China matched the United States in the number of rocket launches into space (15), the first time any nation has equaled the United States," and that "peaceful Japan is planning to put a directed-energy weapon on its next-generation fighter."
He cites ways in which the Pentagon is moving in similar directions, including the US Air Force's directed-energy directorate, the Navy's "maritime" laser demonstration project, and a study of computer systems' ability to withstand attacks. But he worries that "the brass is still clamoring to build the legacy systems—think aircraft-carrier battle groups—that will soon be vulnerable to the new weapons." He warns, "Somehow, we need to stop being the suckers when it comes to defense."
Dark-energy research dream may be deferred
"What happens to a dark energy dream deferred?" asks Dennis Overbye at the top of his article "Quest for Dark Energy May Fade to Black." The lengthy piece appeared on the front page of the 4 January New York Times Science Times section. The dream at risk is NASA's space science project WFIRST, or Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.
Scientists had hoped to see WFIRST launched for investigations not only of dark energy and the expansion of the universe, but of exoplanets. But Overbye reports that the $1.6 billion spacecraft might now become a casualty of "cost overruns and mismanagement" on the Hubble's replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope. Despite strong scientific demand and endorsement by the National Academy, NASA might now postpone WFIRST for a decade. There's serious talk of members of WFIRST's research community allying themselves instead with a European project called Euclid.
Overbye writes, "The news has dismayed many American astronomers, who worry they will wind up playing second fiddle to their European counterparts in what they say is the deepest mystery in the universe." He quotes one astronomer's lament: "How many things can we do in our lifetime that will excite a generation of scientists?"
To help nonscientists understand that now-possibly-deferred excitement, Overbye includes this passage:
Dark energy certainly counts as frontier science. The discovery a decade ago that the universe is speeding up, in defiance of common sense or cosmic gravity, has thrown into doubt notions about the fate of the universe and of life within it, not to mention gravity and even the nature of the laws of physics. It is as if, when you dropped your car keys, they shot up to the ceiling.
Physicists have one ready-made explanation for this behavior, but it is a cure that many of them think is worse than the disease: a fudge factor invented by Einstein in 1917 called the cosmological constant. He suggested, and quantum theory has subsequently confirmed, that empty space could exert a repulsive force, blowing things apart. But the best calculations predict an effect 10 to the exponent of 120 times greater than what astronomers have measured, causing physicists to metaphorically tear their hair out and mutter about multiple universes.
It seems worth appending a note about what to many will have been obvious, namely, that in his "lede" sentence, Overbye alludes to "A Dream Deferred" by the African-American writer Langston Hughes. Maybe that brief, often-cited Harlem Renaissance poem merits quoting here in full:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?Or fester like a sore—And then run?Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
George F. Will endorses the "Gathering Storm" reports
The conservative Washington Post syndicated columnist George F. Will—notorious among climatologists for his aggressive denial of human-caused climate disruption—energetically advocates federal research spending.
Online, Will's 2 January column carries the headline "Rev the scientific engine." In the paper edition, it's "Needed: A science stimulus."
Will cites the National Academies' Gathering Storm reports and declares that federally funded research has become "what canals and roads once were—a prerequisite for long-term economic vitality." Nowadays, he says, "the prerequisites for economic dynamism are ideas."
He argues that "the talent that matters most is the cream of the elite," and that even if today "is not a propitious moment to defend elites, even scientific ones . . . the nation depends on nourishing them and the institutions that sustain them."
He laments that "U.S. undergraduate institutions award 16 percent of their degrees in the natural sciences or engineering," while "South Korea and China award 38 percent and 47 percent, respectively." He charges that "America has been consuming its seed corn" in that, from 1970 to 1995, "federal support for research in the physical sciences, as a fraction of gross domestic product, declined 54 percent; in engineering, 51 percent."
He cautions that universities are in financial danger, and warns his fellow conservatives that even if they deplore "political correctness and academic obscurantism in some disciplines," the endangerment matters for STEM subjects.
He observes that research yielding "epoch-making advances requires time horizons that often are impossible for businesses." He quotes the "iconic conservative" Margaret Thatcher, who studied chemistry at Oxford:Although basic science can have colossal economic rewards, they are totally unpredictable. And therefore the rewards cannot be judged by immediate results. Nevertheless, the value of [Michael] Faraday's work today must be higher than the capitalization of all shares on the stock exchange.
And he worries that "misbegotten stimulus legislation" may have provoked an "indiscriminate reaction against federal spending" that will be "doubly dangerous if a curdled populism, eager to humble elites, targets a sphere of American supremacy and a basis of its revival—its premier research universities."
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
