Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [0]
MICHAEL BROOKS, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is a consultant at New Scientist magazine and writes a weekly column for the New Statesman. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer, Times Higher Education and many other newspapers and magazines. He has lectured at New York University, The American Museum of Natural History and Cambridge University. His first book, 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense was translated into eight languages. www.michaelbrooks.org
Also by Michael Brooks
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense
Free Radicals
THE SECRET ANARCHY OF SCIENCE
MICHAEL BROOKS
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
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Copyright © Michael Brooks, 2011
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CONTENTS
Prologue
1 How it Begins
Dreams, drugs and visions from God
2 The Delinquents
Rules are there to be broken
3 Masters of Illusion
Evidence isn’t everything
4 Playing with Fire
No pain, no gain
5 Sacrilege
Breaking taboos is part of the game
6 Fight Club
There’s no prize for the runner-up
7 Defending the Throne
Machiavelli would be proud
8 In the Line of Fire
Life on the barricades
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes and sources
Index
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
Jacob Bronowski
PROLOGUE
I
t is 5.15 pm on 23 March 2003. In a brightly lit auditorium in Davis, California, Harvard cosmologist Lisa Randall is trying to give a talk about her research. The audience contains some of the greatest scientific minds on the planet, even some Nobel laureates, but no one is paying Randall any attention. Even she is having trouble concentrating. Her eyes flick repeatedly from her notes to the front row of the audience. There, on the far right of the auditorium, Stephen Hawking is being given his tea-time soup. It’s quite a sight.
Earlier in the day Hawking gave a sparkling talk, crammed with witty asides and acerbic commentaries on the state of science. It was delivered via his speech synthesiser, with that hallmark monotony; Hawking is paralysed by motor neuron disease and simply cannot speak for himself. Eating is similarly problematic.
His nurses are trying their best to avoid a spectacle, but it is difficult. The spoon won’t quite go into his mouth, and the soup dribbles down his chin. It is unquestionably distracting: not one of these fine minds has the capacity to ignore the goings-on in the front row and focus exclusively on Randall’s talk. Discomfiting as this scenario is, there is an upside. Here, in this strange moment of their lofty, cerebral lives, it has become clear, just for a moment, that these scientists are very human beings.
The humanity of scientists – and what that really means – is what this book is about. For more than fifty years, scientists have been involved in a cover-up that is arguably one of the most successful of modern times. It has succeeded because even the scientists haven’t understood what has been going on.
After the Second World War, science was given a makeover. It was turned