SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS

 

SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS

For many years I was under the impression that if someone’s knowledge had acquired recognition – in the form of university tenure, awards, publications, a position of authority, or respect of his peers – then that knowledge was beyond question, and I could accept that person’s teachings as “gospel”. That trust in expert knowledge was rapidly dissipated when I entered into a career as a NASA research scientist.

Within the first few months of my employment, I was called into a presentation on helicopter aerodynamics to be given by the head of the chemistry department of a large eastern university. He proceeded to inform us with a straight face that helicopter lift was actually due to an agitation of air similar to the water motion induced by the agitator in a clothes washer, while he displayed a series of equations to support his theory. Apparently, he did not realize that the theory of helicopter aerodynamics was already well in hand; and the error in his mathematics was obvious even to me – at that time a novice in the field of applied mathematics.

A tenured professor of Applied Mathematics at a respected Virginia university once told me, “You people at NASA will never make any progress until you realize that the solar system is just one large atom” - a statement that was wrong in so many ways that it demonstrated that he had no knowledge of physics beyond what existed in his imagination.

A visiting professor from a major British university informed us that the “mysterious” east coast sonic booms were caused by the Concorde making a turning maneuver over England as it attained supersonic speeds. I could continue with tales of many personal encounters with professors who proclaimed sheer nonsense, while speaking in a condescending manner to engineers who possessed knowledge that had to be real because its product was required for the design and analysis of real-world vehicles.

In our present day we have even more of the science authorities who ply their version of speculative science in popular science books and spectacular TV "celebrity science" presentations.

When I was a young man, a popular cosmology theory was known as “the oscillating universe”. It received much attention in the celebrity science community until Einstein pointed out that it violated the principle of entropy – a principle so basic that it is taught in every general physics course, and yet none of those famous scientists had learned it. But now we have no Einstein to expose the numerous fallacies in the books and lectures on “virtual particles”, “string theory”, “dark matter”, “chaos theory”, (which is itself a logical contradiction in terms).

Actually, Lee Smolin, in his book, The Trouble with Physics, explained that one reason for the confusion in predicting the dimension of space by string theory was that the problem was improperly posed mathematically. One can choose arbitrarily a parameter (the dimension of space) so that the results are consistent with his analysis. Such a fudge factor theory is meaningless. Hyperspace, by M. Kaku, is a seriously intended, but actually amusing, history of the various theories, each of which requires its particular dimension - from 4 to 21, in view of Smolin's finding.

I could write a series of posts, explaining why quantum mechanics is at best a waste of time and at worst a distraction that draws mind power away from useful science. I could also write about the mental and logistic problems and requirements for efficient research to be conducted. However, I don't think such writing would have much appeal to the average reader. On the other hand, I doubt that many readers are aware of the rather surprising approach to innovation that has proven to be effective, and so we'll focus on that aspect of research.

Since innovation is largely a matter of inspiration, we'll take a look at the psychological attitudes that tend to induce inspiration.

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