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Why science doesn't make sense
By Michael Brooks
Telegraph (U.K.)

Sunday, March 31, 2009

Wouldn't it be great if science was a cool, logical process? According to a new book, no, not really

Wouldn't it be great if science was a cool, logical process? If you could work out how the universe ticks without making the chilling discovery that most of it is missing? Or if, when you were investigating the placebo effect, you didn't find that some licensed drugs only work when you know you're taking them?

Unfortunately, as these examples show, things don't often work as neatly as scientists might like. Doing science is messy and difficult - and that's before you factor in its human side. Jealous rivals, journal editors who think your subject is a joke, or colleagues with a lot to lose if your latest discovery pans out: other people can all make the scientific life a difficult one.

Perhaps the most notorious example of this phenomenon is the cold fusion debacle, which celebrated - if that is the word - its 20th anniversary last week. At its most basic, cold fusion is the notion that we might be able to release nuclear energy without the drama of exploding atom bombs or spending billions of dollars on fusion reactors.

In March 1989, the University of Utah's Stanley Pons and Southampton University's Martin Fleischmann, then a recently elected Fellow of the Royal Society, announced at a press conference that they had achieved a first step towards this goal: the room-temperature production of nuclear energy through the electrolysis of heavy water. The announcement was premature, to say the least: no one managed to replicate their findings in the six months that followed, and the pair quickly became scientific pariahs.

A couple of years ago, as part of research for my book about scientific mysteries, 13 Things That Don't Make Sense, I visited Fleischmann at his home in the south of England. He told me some of what happened two decades ago. He never wanted to make unlimited free energy, he said: he just wanted to understand more about what goes on in the nucleus of an atom (there are some gaping holes in our nuclear theories). According to Fleischmann, the way his work was over-hyped by the University of Utah's press office took him by surprise. His biggest regret lies in playing along with something he knew to be spectacularly misjudged.

Fleischmann is a weary old man, with little hope of redemption. But 100 years from now, he might well be rehabilitated. The claim that nuclear energy could be released in room temperature experiments remains unproven, but a small cadre of reputable researchers have quietly continued the investigation. So far, their results look promising.

Progress is slow, however, because it is disreputable research. Today's cold fusion pioneers are, or were, respected scientists, but have been able to get little or no funding. Most have had to pursue cold fusion in their spare time, and some have even lost jobs over their continued interest.

In science, it was ever thus; progress is far harder-won than you might imagine. Experimental anomalies are often the things that expose the shortcomings of contemporary thinking - so you might imagine that they would be greeted with delight. Yet the opposite is usually true: the things that don't make sense are often the downfall of any scientists who embrace them.

In the 17th century, the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer suggested that light did not travel infinitely fast, but at a limited speed. This was a heresy at the time, so Roemer arranged for an experimental test. It worked, but his rival (and boss) Giovanni Cassini dismissed the result. Because of Cassini's position as head of the Paris Observatory, the entire scientific establishment colluded in Roemer's humiliation. He was only vindicated after Cassini's death.

Yet Roemer was lucky, in a way; sometimes a scientist is only recognised after his own death. Alfred Wegener proposed the idea of plate tectonics, also known as continental drift, in 1915, after reading about a number of geological curiosities. First, there was the strange case of identical plant and animal fossils found on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The orthodox explanation was that "land bridges" had once spanned the ocean, allowing free passage to seed-carrying animals. But there was also the matching shape of the coastlines: Africa and South America seemed to nestle perfectly together, while many of the large geological features of different continents, such as the Appalachian mountains and the Scottish Highlands, seemed to have been separated at birth.

It was all too much of a coincidence for Wegener, who became convinced that there had once existed a "super-continent", Pangaea, which had broken up to form today's landmasses. It wasn't long before American geologists had organised a symposium to discredit Wegener's idea, and decades of derision followed. It was only with another symposium, held at the Royal Society in 1964 - 34 years after Wegener's death - that plate tectonics was accepted.

In science, established ideas die hard. Charles Darwin noted this when he published On The Origin of Species. "I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine," he said. Instead, he declared, he was looking to the future, to "young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality".

Not much has changed in the intervening century and a half. Many of today's anomalies are meeting the same reception as Wegener's work. Researchers seeking to explain why we age and die are split into two feuding camps, one holding that ageing is controlled by a genetic switch, one that it results from accumulated mutations. The rift over the efficacy of homeopathy is bitter and quite possibly beyond resolution. Then there is the space scientist Gilbert Levin, who claims that an experiment he designed for Nasa discovered the signs of microbial life in Martian soil during the 1976 Viking missions. He was rebuffed by Nasa for three decades; indeed, things got so bad that he was not invited to the party celebrating the mission's 20th anniversary. Yet in the last few years, his peers have begun to admit that he could have been right all along.

Similarly, Joan Roughgarden, a professor of evolution at Stanford University in California, has suggested that the diverse sexual behaviours of the animal kingdom - including homosexual coupling - make more sense if you consider that biology is not all about the selfish gene. Because of this "heresy", she has had to tolerate personal, targeted insults from peers reviewing her work.

It is worth pointing out that things aren't always so painful. The anomalies that led to relativity and quantum theory provoked immediate and respectful investigation. Some of today's anomalies are receiving similarly positive attention: the fact that 96 per cent of the universe appears to be missing has spawned a multi-billion dollar hunt. Looking for the "dark matter" and the "dark energy" that are thought to make up the shortfall is a perfectly respectable pursuit.

Even here, however, we are failing to learn the lessons of history. Suggesting that there might be other, better explanations for the missing universe is definitely not respectable; researchers who insist on swimming against the tide in this field, by proposing that we might do better to modify Newton's laws of gravity, are sometimes derided in terms similar to those used against Pons and Fleischmann all those years ago.

Perhaps this ugly, human side of science is inescapable. But if we could only learn to make use of hindsight, scientists might experience less pain and more gain. History is clear: today's scientific anomalies - however painful they are to face - are likely to be more important than we realise. In many respects, the things that don't make sense are the only things that matter.

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