Notice how Einstein’s paper begins by trying to make sense of experimental results. Wherever possible, scientists experiment. Which experiments suggest themselves often depends on which theories currently prevail. Scientists are intent on testing those theories to the breaking point. They do not trust what is intuitively obvious. That the Earth is flat was once obvious. That heavy bodies fall faster than light ones was once obvious. That bloodsucking leeches cure most diseases was once obvious. That some people are naturally and by divine decree slaves was once obvious. That there is such a place as the centre of the Universe, and that the Earth sits in that exalted spot was once obvious. That there is an absolute standard of rest was once obvious. The truth may be puzzling or counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held beliefs. Experiment is how we get a handle on it.
At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to the toast, ‘To physics and metaphysics’. By ‘metaphysics’, people then meant something like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking about them. They could also have included pseudoscience. Wood answered along these lines: the physicist has an idea. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it seems to make. He consults the scientific literature. The more he reads, the more promising the idea becomes. Thus prepared, he goes to the laboratory and devises an experiment to test it. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are checked. The accuracy of measurement is refined, the error bars reduced. He lets the chips fall where they may. He is devoted only to what the experiment teaches. At the end of all this work, through careful experimentation, the idea is found to be worthless. So the physicist discards it, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.*
[* As the pioneering physicist Benjamin Franklin put it, ‘In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves obliged to destroy?’ At the very least, he thought, the experience sufficed to ‘help to make a vain Man humble’.]
The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.
For me, there are four main reasons for a concerted effort to convey science – on radio and TV, in movies, newspapers, books, computer programs, theme parks and classrooms – to every citizen. In all uses of science, it is insufficient – indeed it is dangerous – to produce only a small, highly competent, well-rewarded priesthood of professionals. Instead, some fundamental understanding of the findings and methods of science must be available on the broadest scale.
• Despite plentiful opportunities for misuse, science can be the golden road out of poverty and backwardness for emerging nations. It makes national economies and the global civilization run. Many nations understand this. It is why so many graduate students in science and engineering at American graduate schools – still the best in the world – are from other countries. The corollary, one that the United States sometimes fails to grasp, is that abandoning science is the road back into poverty and backwardness.
• Science alerts us to the perils introduced by our world-altering technologies, especially to the global environment on which our lives depend. Science provides an essential early warning system.
• Science teaches us about the deepest issues of origins, natures and fates-of our species, of life, of our planet, of the Universe. For the first time in human history we are able to secure a real understanding of some of these matters. Every culture on Earth has addressed such issues and valued their importance. All of us feel goosebumps when we approach these grand questions. In the long run, the greatest gift of science may be in teaching us, in ways no other human endeavour has been able, something about our cosmic context, about where, when and who we are.
• The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy began – in their civilized incarnations – in the same time and place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Science confers power on anyone who takes the trouble to learn it (although too many have been systematically prevented from doing so). Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas; its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty. Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being. If we’re true to its values, it can tell us when we’re being lied to. It provides a mid-course correction to our mistakes. The more widespread its language, rules and methods, the better chance we have of preserving what Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues had in mind. But democracy can also be subverted more thoroughly through the products of science than any pre-industrial demagogue ever dreamed.
Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don’t practise these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along.
An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on earth – scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children on television and radio and in movies, newspapers, magazines, comics and many books -might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?
3
The Man in the Moon
and the Face on Mars
The moon leaps
In the Great River’s current…
Floating on the wind,
What do I resemble?
Du Fu, Travelling at Night’ (China, Tang Dynasty, 765)
Each field of science has its own complement of pseudo-science. Geophysicists have flat Earths, hollow Earths, Earths with wildly bobbing axes to contend with, rapidly rising and sinking continents, plus earthquake prophets. Botanists have plants whose passionate emotional lives can be monitored with He detectors, anthropologists have surviving ape-men, zoologists have extant dinosaurs, and evolutionary biologists have Biblical literalists snapping at their flanks. Archaeologists have ancient astronauts, forged runes and spurious statuary. Physicists have perpetual motion machines, an army of amateur relativity disprovers, and perhaps cold fusion. Chemists still have alchemy. Psychologists have much of psychoanalysis and almost all of parapsychology. Economists have long-range economic forecasting. Meteorologists, so far, have long-range weather forecasting, as in the sunspot-oriented Farmer’s Almanac (although long-term climate forecasting is another matter). Astronomy has, as its most prominent pseudoscience, astrology But because I work mainly with planets, and because I’ve been interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the pseudo-sciences that most often park themselves on my doorstep involve other worlds and what we have come so easily in our time to – the discipline out of which it emerged. The pseudosciences sometimes intersect, compounding the confusion – as in telepathic searches for buried treasures from Atlantis, or astrological economic forecasting.
But because I work mainly with planets, and because I’ve been interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the pseudo-sciences that most often park themselves on my doorstep involve other worlds and what we have come so easily in our time to call ‘aliens’. In the chapters immediately following, I want to lay out two recent, somewhat related pseudoscientific doctrines. They share the possibility that human perceptual and cognitive imperfections play a role in deceiving us on matters of great import. The first contends that a giant stone face from ages past is staring expressionlessly up at the sky from the sands of Mars. The second maintains that alien beings from distant worlds visit the Earth with casual impunity.
Even when summarized so baldly, isn’t there a kind of thrill in contemplating these claims? What if such hoary science fiction ideas – resonant surely with deep human fears and longings -actually were coming to pass? Whose interest can fail to be aroused? Immersed in such material, even the crassest cynic is stirred. Are we absolutely sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we can dismiss these claims? And if hardened debunkers can sense the appeal, what must those untutored in scientific scepticism, like Mr ‘Buckley’, feel?
For most of history – before spacecraft, before telescopes, when we were still largely immersed in magical thinking – the Moon was an enigma. Almost no one thought of it as a world.