Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [18]
Kekulé suggested to his colleagues that, in search of breakthroughs, they should ‘learn to dream!’ We might equally encourage scientific progress by learning to take drugs, or embracing a worldview where a Divine Hand has created a rational, intelligible universe. After all, as that old mystic Einstein said, ‘The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.’ If there is nothing rational, logical or obvious about the universe’s openness to investigation, why would our methods of investigation need to be any different?
There is a secret anarchy, then, behind the inspirations of science, but it is nothing compared with the anarchy that follows. After the initial inspiration, the scientist has to gather evidence to confirm or refute the idea. This process is the bedrock of science, and it is why scientists throw up their hands in horror or shame whenever a claim of scientific fraud surfaces. But this seems to be something of a pantomime. It must be – why else would scientists refer to fraud as ‘normal misbehaviour’?
THE DELINQUENTS
Rules are there to be broken
O
n a clear, cold morning in January 2008, a group of students walked nervously through the campus of La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university. When they reached the university’s centrepiece, a huge bronze statue of Minerva, they took a nervous look over their shoulders and set to work. They taped a banner to the pedestal beneath Minerva’s skirts and stepped back to admire their moment of anarchy. ‘Knowledge needs neither fathers nor priests,’ the banner declared. ‘Knowledge is secular.’
The message was a direct challenge to the Vatican. Later that week, Pope Benedict XVI was due to cross Rome to visit La Sapienza, and the students and faculty were far from happy about it. The Pope, they said, was ‘anti-science’. Elsewhere on the campus, others were making their feelings known in different ways. Student protestors had taken over the Rector’s office. Scores of faculty members had signed a letter, published in the daily newspaper la Repubblica, voicing strong objections to the visit. The Pope’s presence at the university would be ‘incongruous’, the letter said.
The anarchists won the battle: that evening, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, sent word that the visit was to be cancelled. Fearing a humiliating scene, Bertone regretted that ‘the conditions for a dignified and peaceful welcome were lacking’, and conveyed his apologies to the Rector. The news was greeted with a resounding cheer from students and professors. Then, a few hours later, their delight melted into awkward embarrassment. It turned out they had got the Pope all wrong.
The demonstrations had been prompted by a speech delivered by the Pope back in 1990, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger. The basis for the letter in la Repubblica was the transcript of this speech, taken from the Italian-language Wikipedia website. The Cardinal, the letter said, had defended the Church’s decision to put Galileo on trial for suggesting that the Earth moves around the Sun. The writers of the letter damned the Pope with his own words: he had described the trial of Galileo as ‘rational and just’, they said, and declared that ‘the Church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself’. The sixty-seven signatories made their feelings very clear: ‘These words offend and humiliate us.’
We might reasonably expect those signatories, as scientists, to have checked their facts. If they had called up the Wikipedia page for themselves, and scrolled down to Ratzinger’s discussion of the Galileo affair, they would have seen that the Cardinal was not attacking science – quite the opposite, in fact. He was attacking those who stood by the medieval Church’s attack on Galileo. Ratzinger singled out