Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [3]
This is not the ‘wacky’ science, the crazy things that happen on the fringes of research. This is the mainstream. These anarchies are behind many of the Nobel Prizes of the last few decades – the decades that have given us such powerful insights into what the universe is, how it works and how we fit into its schemes. It really does seem that, in science, anything goes.
And this is no modern phenomenon. Science has always been this way, because this is how it works. Isaac Newton, for instance, was cavalier with scientific truth, and cared nothing for the accepted rules of engagement. His writings contain passages that his biographers have declared to be ‘nothing short of deliberate fraud’. He routinely made discoveries then kept them to himself, taunting his colleagues about his ‘secret knowledge’.
Newton is known for humbly declaring that he had achieved his great breakthroughs by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. Though this may be true in part, it is largely humbug. Newton was hardly humble, and it would be just as true to say that he achieved greatness by stamping on the shoulders of giants. When others, such as Robert Hooke and Gottfried Liebniz, made breakthroughs in fields he was also researching, Newton fought ferociously to deny them credit for their work. Though his reputation has been polished for centuries – he is the ‘scientist’s scientist’ – Newton was not someone you would want to put in charge of science today; in later life he suffered episodes of madness and became obsessed with the Old Testament Book of Daniel, writing a commentary on it that he considered his greatest work. Hardly the model of scientific level-headedness.
Albert Einstein, who is widely considered to be the greatest scientist in history after Newton, provides another classic and shocking example of the reality behind scientific progress. Einstein relied on mystical insights – insights that his mathematics was not good enough to prove. His papers are riddled with errors and convenient omissions – though they were lazy fudges rather than, as with Newton, deliberate frauds. Einstein repeatedly failed to take account of known facts when formulating his ideas. He bristled at reviewers’ criticisms of his papers. More than once he argued that any data found to be in conflict with his beautiful ideas should be ignored. He took credit for the E = mc2 equation even though he wasn’t the first to suggest it. Neither did he ever manage to prove it, despite eight published attempts: it was left to other, better mathematicians to set the world’s most famous equation on the firm footing it has today.
History, they say, is written by the winners. Perhaps that’s why Galileo Galilei is also known as a hero, not a fraud. His Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, banned for two centuries by the Catholic Church because it provides a bedrock for the heliocentric universe, is riddled with glaring errors. Though this monograph earned him a life sentence under house arrest, Galileo was no martyr to the truth: in many places, his science simply does not stand up. Given the man’s obvious brilliance, historians now concede that his errors are an attempt at fraud resulting from obsession. Galileo was so convinced that the Earth moved round the Sun that he wasn’t prepared to let the difficulties of making a watertight argument get in the way.
As we will see in the pages that follow, the tradition of scientific anarchy continues right up to the present day – though today’s anarchies are much better concealed. But the purpose of this book is not just to present a string of entertaining anecdotes about scientific ‘misbehaviour’. Its purpose is to show how scientists get the job done, and to argue that our misplaced expectations of science are preventing further discovery. This brand identity is not how science really is, and the disparity between the public image of science and the way breakthroughs are actually