wbeaty, I think you’re conflating two admittedly similar phenomena in the sociology of science. Not every ‘disappeared’ discovery is a matter of something or someone being ridiculed or dismissed out of hand. As a scientist at the beginning of his career, I can tell you that scientists suggest outrageous ideas as a matter of course, and by and large are accustomed to discarding them. If you want the records of all the ideas once considered possible, look up the archives of any peer-reviewed scientific journal. Especially the theoretical journals.
I don’t think anyone who knows anything about science or scientists believes that science is some kind of monolithic infallible entity. Examples do about of failed theories. Flat earth, geocentrism, transmutation of elements, phlogiston, Lamarckian evolution, ether, the plum pudding model of the atom, et cetera et cetera et cetera. Any scientist in a specific field could rattle off half a dozen more from their own field. Here are some from my field: local hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics, the plain old hot big bang, cosmic strings as agents in galactic formation, white holes. Those are just the greatest hits of the failed theories. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, the failed idea was simply dropped. It’s a rare exception that the people behind the idea are subject to the same treatment.
Keeping only those ‘discoveries’ which survive? That’s how science works. We throw out the ideas that fail. For every almost-lost true discovery, there are a thousand more false discoveries that were simply discarded.
I’m nearly completely ignorant about the details of the kerfluffle that went down, but I think at least a part of it must’ve been just how simple the argument ‘disproving’ Shechtman’s findings is: there simply is no way to cover space in cells giving the right symmetry in order to cause the observed diffraction pattern. Take 2-D space as a simplified example: you can’t tile it, i.e. cover it uniformly so that no gaps remain, with regular pentagons; thus, there can be no tiling pattern that is symmetric under rotations of 2π/5 = 72°. So if anybody tells you there is, you’ll immediately know they’re full of shit.
But the problem is that you’ve implicitly assumed that the tiling you consider is periodic – i.e. that there exists a shift of the whole pattern by some fixed amount, so that the shifted pattern is indistinguishable from the original one. This seems like an innocent assumption – it just seems obvious that any way to lay down tiles to cover all of space must repeat eventually --, but interestingly, it turns out not to be. And indeed, giving up this requirement makes patterns with five-fold symmetry possible! (Just notice how you can draw a regular pentagon going through the five grey pentagons connected to the blue central one, or the five blue pentagons some distance out from there, or the five green stars at a yet greater radius, etc., if it’s not obvious at first glance.)
IMO, stories like these, somewhat contrary to some things that have been said in this thread, really highlight the self-correcting, non-dogmatic nature of science: the thing to take away is not that Shechtman’s discovery was much maligned and ridiculed, but rather, that despite this malignancy and ridicule, from some of science’s highest authorities no less, Shechtman now is a Nobel laureate! Indeed, all those ‘how-wrong-was-science!’-stories have one thing in common: that we now know that science was wrong, because we discovered it through science.
Or take a look at what’s been uploaded to arXiv’s hep-ph section following the OPERA results…
This isn’t precisely on topic, but it does relate in a way and it’s one of my favorite math stories.
There are 14 know ways (or classes of ways) to tile the plane with irregular convex pentagons. Four of which were discovered by Marjorie Rice .
The interesting thing about Marjorie Rice is that she was a homemaker who never took a math class beyond a check book balancing class in high school. She read a Martin Gardner column that said there were exactly nine ways to tile the plane with irregular convex pentagons and proof was forthcoming. She said to herself, “Wouldn’t it be neat if I could find another way to do that?”
Then she proceeded to find four more ways and only one other way has been found since.
If you think Shechtman had difficulty getting his results accepted, imagine the obstacles in Marjorie Rice’s path. Eventually, a mathematician named Doris Schattschneider was able to decipher Marjorie’s invented notation, and verify that the result was correct.
I’m only talking about genuine discoveries, not about speculations, or about work that turned out wrong in the end. I’m pointing out a long history of genuine discoveries that were temporarily silenced by hostility/ridicule. Beveridge does the same in his chapter about irrational resistance to new ideas. (And he’s talking about valid ideas, not about new but wrong speculations, and he gives many examples.) The same is true of the essays in Hidden Histories of Science. Again, consider the title, “Hidden histories.” Why should there be hidden histories in science? Why should someone be publishing an essay collection about it? Isn’t anyone curious?
Yes, and those aren’t part of my topic. I point out that black swans exist and need to be dealt with, and you point that the number of white swans is vast. So? The vast number of correctly-dropped bad ideas says nothing about the crime of using emotion to block a valid new discovery. Or are you saying that unthinking emotion-based attacks are a proper and acceptable part of the selection force in science? I thought that selection force was supposed to be based on reason.
I strongly disagree. Yes, we all agree that “sure, science isn’t perfect.” But then we go and behave as if it is, as if no big changes need be made.
Ah, I see the point. Those failed theories are different. They don’t expose any great flaws in the scientific process or expose any embarrassing failures. Instead they demonstrate the power of science. They show that science shrugs off mistakes, that it’s seemly immune to serious disasters. They show that science is basically OK as it is, and doesn’t need major changes. Science is self-correcting and therefore not really fallible.
Not fallible. Heh.
On the other hand, the story of Peyton Rous and the cancer virus shows something else. Or the story of “jumping genes.” Or even the bit about the ridicule and scorn directed at the Scanning Tunneling Microscope. If these scientists hadn’t fought back, then today those discoveries would now be in the trash pile with N-rays and such. But they’d be there because of ridicule, not because they were wrong.
Gah! No no no. Read again. You totally misunderstood that Beveridge quote. I don’t know how to say it more clearly: if we notice that genuine discoveries are almost being lost because of hostile reaction, this suggests that some genuine discoveries were completely lost. They were perfectly real; they had supporting evidence, they easily made it over the hump of critical analysis, but they couldn’t make it over the hump of thoughtless ridicule.
But where’s my evidence? Sorry, I don’t have any. By definition I can have none. We can only know about the valid discoveries which were almost lost. If any were truly lost, then today we’d think of them as incorrect/disproved, when actually they are perfectly valid. To find any of them, we’d have to sift through the vast pile of rejected incorrect ideas. Go feeling around in the sewage, looking for discarded diamonds.
OK, you did understand Beveridge. Sheesh. Conflating “failure” with “blocked by unthinking emotions.” As if the white swans can reduce the number of the black. This is a very weird thread. I guess I should have expected it. After all, it’s NOT OK to criticize science. Only Creationists and the conspiracy-believing Tinfoil hats crowd are allowed that privilege.
Why the hostility? Because solid worldviews were suddenly made questionable. Thomas Kuhn tried to explain it by creating the “paradigm shift” concept. When valid new information threatens an existing paradigm, that information is resisted. “Resisted” doesn’t necessarily mean ignored. It can mean use of emotion-based tactics such as ridicule to deflate and marginalize the threat, as well as attacks on supporters, loss of tenure, warring cliques, whispering campaigns, secret petitions, getting transferred to low level jobs, etc. etc. Dr. Brian Martin points out that this half-hidden aspect of science is similar to whistleblowers fighting a corrupt bureaucracy. Some articles at Brian Martin: publications on whistleblowing and suppression of dissent
Here’s one of mine. We’re all brought up to view Science as essentially complete. We’re not living in the middle ages anymore, and we’ve just about figured everything out, correct? There’s GR vs. QM of course, but other than that, the science of 2211 won’t be that far advanced compared to 2011. Now what if someone makes a serious discovery that puts a crack in our confident stance? What if something shakes us up and suggests that we are all still back in the year 1300, and that science is still in its very earliest stages? Nooooooooooooooo! The instant response is to try to silence the messenger. He’s making us all look bad! For some people, shaking up their foundation concepts is like a threat to their survival. “Religious fervor” isn’t necessarily limited to nonscientists.
“Sometimes I really regret that I did not live in those times when there was still so much that was new; to be sure enough much is yet unknown, but I do not think that it will be possible to discover anything easily nowadays that would lead us to revise our entire outlook as radically as was possible in the days when telescopes and microscopes were still new.”
1875 letter from Heinrich Hertz as a physics student
They’re not something you can find in documents, but:
whenever you talk about protein folding, you have to mention Levinthal’s Paradox (“if proteins folded at random [as people were assuming when he pointed this out], the time needed by an average-sized protein to fold would be longer than the age of the universe - therefore, protein-folding cannot be random”). I did the first but, having been taught to Always Check Your Cites, read the paper everybody cited, and found out it didn’t mention proteins at all: it was an article about sugar chemistry. Some research discovered that the paradox had been pointed out, not in a peer-reviewed paper, but in the opening speech of a scientific round-table discussion during an ACS meeting; the only written report was the ACS-published notes taken by a graduate student.
I got a lower grade on my presentation for daring to correct the list of cites.
Two months later, there was an interview in Chemical and Engineering News in which the repoter asked Levinthal “how do you feel about having the most-cited article ever?” Levinthal answered “I’d feel better if people cited the right one.” People now cite the conference papers - but many are still citing the article on sugars, copying the cite of someone who copied the cite of…
Can I have an € for every time I’ve heard a scientist say “impossible!” when the results of an experiment weren’t what he expected? Apparently, many never had a teacher who pointed out that “expected results are nice but not very informative, the ones that bring us to new information, new fields, new borders are UNexpected ones.”
The tl;dr version: the hostility is an emotional reaction to people seeing their tranquil status quo threatened. The part I don’t get is why would researchers be so afraid of new things but hey, many people are in jobs where they don’t really belong.
When you explained to the instructor that you had read the paper and found no mention of proteins in it, and you had gone on to find set of notes that is actually relevant to the issue, what was his or her response? What reason did she give for the lowered grade?
Not in the 20th century, but the late 19th, there is distinguished German chemist (and journal editor) Hermann Kolbe’s response to Van 't Hoff’s pioneering work in stereochemisty. He likened Van 't Hoff’s ideas to “witchcraft and exorcism,” and as “dressed up in the modern fashion and rouged freshly, like a whore whom one tries to smuggle into good society where she does not belong.” The invective goes on for a couple of pages, and also declares that another distinguished chemist, Wislicenus, who had praised Van’t Hoff’s work, had thereby “withdrawn from the ranks of exact natural scientists”. (Quoted by Van’t Hoff, 1878)
Well, maybe some people are having similar reactions to mine: it’s hard to tell what your motivation is. It seems that if you’re interested in finding the truth, then pointing out a common failing with science (as practiced by less than perfectly rational human beings) should be followed by either suggestions to improve the process, or at least suggestions on how to interpret science’s findings. But instead you seem to be mostly saying “See! Those pointy-headed scientists are wrong, too! So there!”.
I mean, for someone who’s criticizing scientists for emotional reactions, you kind of come off as someone with a beam in their own eye.
And then, on the substance, you should really acknowledge that, given limited resources, rational investigation needs to choose which findings to follow up on, and a rational part of the choice is deciding which findings are likely to be fruitful, and which are likely to be experimental error of some sort. The only rational way to decide is to use the weight of current evidence and theory, and the objective fact that most findings that contradict current theory are due to error/chance, rather than providing real evidence for a new theory.
So, in fact, it’s perfectly rational to be slow to investigate and accept paradigm-changing findings, until more evidence accumulates. This isn’t to say that scientists are always perfectly rational, and indeed there’s certainly emotional reasons for rejecting new theories. But I think a decent critique needs to acknowledge that there are indeed rational reasons for being slow to accept new paradigms. After all most proposed new paradigms are wrong.
(Or, to torture your swans analogy, it does matter that the vast majority of swans are white, if we don’t have the resources to look at every single swan individually. In that case, it makes perfectly rational sense to treat swans as “Most probably white until there’s some evidence otherwise”.
Exactly, that’s why I’m always going on about it! And because it’s horrifying we should latch onto it and follow up the details. Don’t let it trigger our denial.
Also ‘The Reality Club’ on edge.org discussed it quite awhile back, as “The End of Horgan.” http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge16.html But I think what’s really terrifying is how little it’s discussed and how few books exist. I find that when the topic comes up on forums, either it’s dismissed on the grounds that its a common crackpot accusation, or its dismissed as being …a conspiracy theory(!)
More quotes, but I’m not sure about origins:
“Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by
beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a
journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will
turn it down” - Sir Fred Hoyle
“The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in
editors rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of
anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by
censorship will be the death of science.” -J. Schwinger
Hmmm, isn’t Hoyle a Nobelist too, as well as Philip Anderson? Maybe they should all combine forces.
I am not familiar with Shechtman’s work, but from what I’ve heard (including the linked article) it appears that any initial resistance to his ideas waned a long time ago, seeing as he’s repeatedly been proposed for the Nobel Prize (and that award typically comes long after one’s work has been accepted in the scientific community). I didn’t see where he’d ever been “fired” for his theories (he was dismissed from a research group at his institution and joined another). Despite a negative reaction from some peers, he doesn’t seem to have been blocked from conducting research and accumulating publications. It’s a bit of a mystery to me why his story is being taken by some as an example of how science resists the Truth; it’s more a case of initial skepticism regarding a novel concept that gave way to acceptance and admiration via rigorous application of the scientific method.
I agree. And this touches on an aspect of the Shechtman story that is likely to be played up for a long time to come - one in which he becomes a leading player in the “Galileo Gambit”. According to that moldy old trope, the fact that some pioneers in science were doubted or scorned means that anyone, no matter how bizarre or often discredited their ideas are, must be taken seriously. What this overlooks is that the vast majority of wacky-sounding theories are, in fact, wrong. As Carl Sagan put it:
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Shechtman provided it. But the Bozos running around out there espousing AIDS denialism, homeopathy, antivaccination lunacy etc. do not gain a mantle of respectability because of Shechtman.
Predictably, even supposedly respectable sources have started leaping on the bandwagon to get credence for their views via Shechtman. The Wall St. Journal had an editorial earlier this week claiming that his example shows that consensus opinion is a “lousy” way to conduct science (with a broad wink toward prevailing views on climate change). Scientists in fact are very loath to say “never” in regards to extremely improbable theories. This does not mean that we should avoid rational and effective medical treatments or shy away from sound public policy for fear that one day, against all odds, some unappreciated genius will prove us wrong.
No, what’s not OK is to fail to criticize scientists. That’s how science is constructed: You only get anywhere through extensive criticism. Hoyle’s problem, and that of those like him, is that he didn’t like being criticized, since so many of his ideas didn’t stand up to the criticism.
We (or at least the news media and Hollywood) tend to revere mavericks and those who “think outside the box”. They form part of a cherished tradition of underdogs battling the Establishment. What I’ve seen far too many times in science and medicine is that these people (or their fervent supporters) milk that angle to gain sympathetic coverage, when the effect of the iconoclast’s activities is highly detrimental to public health and welfare and they personally profit from mistaken beliefs or outright unethical behavior.
I think we should differentiate between “practical” sciences like medicine and “theoretical” sciences like physics. With the former, you’re absolutely right, because crafts like medicine or engineering are essentially result-oriented - either it works, or it doesn’t, and acting like a rebel won’t make your crackpot approach more effective. Conversely, if a theory, no matter how insane, obviously saves lives, then the establishment will adopt it, if only because they want the money.
With theoretical sciences like physics, however, the distance between theory and practical application is so great - if practical application even exists - that scientists should be allowed much greater leeway when it comes to theories contrary to the accepted wisdom. I mean, even if they’re wrong, what do we have to lose?
Mye example is from the 19th century, and some of it might have been due to personality conflicts or politics, but Ignaz Semmelweiss was unable to convince many of his fellow doctors that washing their hands when going from autopsy room to patient examination room would help women survive their hospital trip for childbirth.
