Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

Chapter 11: Priests Of The Modern Age: Scientific Revolutions and the Kook-Critic Continuum, Being a Play of Crackpots, Skeptics, Conformists, and the Curious

C H A p T E R 1 1 P R I E S T S O F T H E M O D E R N A G E Scientific Revolutions and the kook–Critic Continuum, Being a Play of Crackpots, Skeptics, Conformists, and the Curious One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways. —Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness people nowadays no longer believe in originality of single people and small groups. Everybody believes in the big group and in the joint power. we have a Maoism in science. let flowers grow. It’s no longer likely to happen. Everybody believes the ideology that it’s no longer possible to be a poincaré or an Einstein. But we also live in the Age of everybody believing in the Big Bang, which is the greatest nonsense of all, if my co-workers are right. And yet it’s impossible to get rid of it. we live in a dogmatic age. people want to derive certainty from common opinions. They don’t believe it’s possible to find something really original. It’s a pity for our young people. They’re not allowed to believe in themselves anymore. —otto Rössler, “Interview: Professor otto Rössler talks on the Large hadron Collider (LhC)” The moral of the tale is the power of reason, its decisive influence on the life of humanity. The great conquerors from Caesar to Napoleon influenced profoundly the lives of subsequent generations. But the total effect of this 134 C l O S I N G T H E O p E N C I R C u I T influence shrinks to insignificance, if compared to the entire transformation of human habits and human mentality produced by the long line of men of thought from Thales to the present day, men individually powerless, but ultimately the rulers of the world. —Alfred North whitehead, Science and the Modern world wALLS OF ORTHODOxy — AND THE REBELS wHO BREAk THROuGH THEm “Scientists are the priests of the modern age, and they must be watched very closely,” wrote Samuel Butler at the end of the nineteenth century. Butler had converted to an evolutionary view after he read Charles Darwin ’s Origin of Species. Since Butler had freed himself, with great difficulty , from his father’s religious doctrine and its ambience, Victorian hypocrisy, he refused subjugation of his critical, curious mind to yet a new authority. If Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake and Galileo Galilei put under house arrest for following their open minds and engaging the evidence—threatening the ecclesiastical arbiters of truth in the form of religious doctrines—so the rise of science as a thought-style threatened to erect a new repressive social structure, one ironically created by science ’s institutionalization of open-mindedness and error correction in the form of the scientific method. Butler’s comments were provoked both by his great intellectual excitement upon reading The Origin of Species —he was convinced—and his disenchantment (after reading some of the predecessors Darwin himself had acknowledged) with Darwin’s toomechanical presentation.In treating organisms as objects created by natural selection presented as a Newtonian-like law, Darwin had removed one of the most important characteristics of organisms themselves from his description: their agency and autonomy, their self-originating ability to alter themselves and their environment. The New Zealand–based Butler became further disenchanted when he tried to contact his former neighbor and was given the cold shoulder by both Darwin and Thomas Huxley,his articulate champion and“bulldog.”Although Butler wasn’t a scientist, he accused Darwin of taking the life out of biology, and stonewalling dissent as a new authoritarian social structure began to arise. Butler’s statement of scientists as priests may surprise some, especially in the United States where religion and science, especially evolu- p R I E S T S O f T H E M O D E R N A G E 135 tionary biology, are often seen to be at each other’s throats. But his comment was sociological. As an iconoclastic freethinker who had resisted his family’s attempts to push him into the clergy...