Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [19]
In his 1975 book Against Method, Feyerabend examined the case of Galileo vs Pope Urban VIII and came to what is, in the modern age, a rather surprising conclusion. Given the nature of the scientific evidence, the robustness of the argument, and the ethical and cultural implications of Galileo’s claims, the arrest and conviction of Galileo was ‘rational and just’, Feyerabend says. ‘The Church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself.’
The quotes the La Sapienza professors had eagerly attributed to Ratzinger were actually from Feyerabend. And, as anyone reading the whole of Ratzinger’s 1990 speech could see, Ratzinger, after quoting Against Method, declared Feyerabend’s conclusions ‘drastic’ given that the philosopher knew full well that Galileo had been right. What’s more, responding to hardliners who suggested that the Church should have been even tougher on Galileo, Ratzinger went on to declare that the faith ‘does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality’. According to Giorgio Israel, a Jewish mathematician who wrote a commentary on the drama in the Vatican’s own newspaper, the speech ‘could well be considered, by anyone who read it with a minimum of attention, as a defence of Galilean rationality’.
The La Sapienza professors had based their opposition to the Pope’s visit on unverified and fallacious claims that served only to confirm their prejudices. As this embarrassing truth emerged, several of the sixty-seven signatories – Luciano Maiani, the physicist who heads Italy’s main scientific research body, for instance – sheepishly withdrew their objections to the Pope’s visit.
Feyerabend, who died in 1994, would have been amused and delighted by the goings-on at La Sapienza. The manufactured outrage of the university’s scientists is a perfect illustration of his most treasured idea: that scientists are anarchists who pay no attention to rules and ‘accepted practice’. After all, the La Sapienza professors were not the first scientists to justify their prejudices with unquestioning use of convenient evidence. Einstein played the same game. Other Nobel laureates, such as Robert Millikan, have done it. Ptolemy, Newton and the beloved Galileo have also been found guilty of progressing science by taking a flexible approach to their experimental observations. Today’s scientists are no different. In 2006 the journal Nature Cell Biology declared in one of its editorials that as many as one in five of its accepted papers contained ‘questionable data’ – even after the journal had introduced a data-screening process.
But to scientists, data are not really to be trusted anyway. When Francis Crick and James Watson were hunting down the structure of DNA, they had to sweep aside the ‘truths’ that others had found. Their crucial breakthrough came when a colleague looked over their shoulders and remarked that the textbooks they were slavishly following contained information that was just plain wrong. They were being misled by guesses (about the angles of chemical bonds) that had been repeated so often that they had gained the status of fact. As a result, Crick said, he learned ‘not to place too much reliance on any single piece of experimental evidence’. Watson’s view was similar: ‘some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong’. Crick and Watson could not have made their world-changing discovery without developing this attitude. When it comes to data, scientists have to be anarchists. And it has ever been thus.
Historians of science attribute the earliest scientific fraud to the Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy: in the second century AD, he manipulated data to support his astronomical models. Some scientists, though, didn’t have the luxury of manipulating the important data. Galileo, for example, just had to hope that sheer force of personality would be enough to stop people noticing his sleight of hand.
Perhaps Galileo’s inclination towards anarchy should have been obvious