Conversations About History, Volume 1

Howard Burton

• Verlag: Ideas Roadshow
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771701020
• Thema: History
• Thema: Roman Ancient History

FIVE BOOKS IN ONE! This collection includes the following 5 complete Ideas Roadshow books featuring leading researchers providing fully accessible insights into cutting-edge academic research while revealing the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research. A detailed preface highlights the connections between the different books and all five books are broken into chapters with a detailed introduction and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: 1. Embracing Complexity - A Conversation with historian David Cannadine, Princeton University. This wide-ranging conversation includes an examination of different aspects of the societal role of both history and historians while rejecting the simplifying distortions of the historical record that we are regularly presented with. David also provides behind-the-scenes insights into several of his bestselling books, including The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences.2. Science and Pseudoscience - A Conversation with Michael Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University. This thought-provoking conversation examines the strange case of Immanuel Velikovsky, author of the bestselling book "Worlds in Collision" that managed to provocatively combine unbridled scientific speculation with ancient myth, as a way of probing the often-problematic boundary between science and pseudoscience.3. Enlightened Entrepreneurialism - A Conversation with Margaret Jacob, Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA. Topics examined during this comprehensive conversation include Margaret Jacob's motivations to become a historian and her comprehensive analysis of the history of the Industrial Revolution and interpretation of the major economic motivations on the ground, comparing daily life experiences in England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.4. The Consolations of History - A Conversation with Teofilo Ruiz, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA. Teo Ruiz is a scholar of the social and popular cultures of late medieval and early modern Spain and the Western Mediterranean. He received the University's Distinguished Teaching Award and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for his "inspired teaching and writing". This wide-ranging conversation provides captivating insights into his Cuban origins, how he became a professional historian, the challenges and excitement of teaching, and what the future might hold.5. Herculaneum Uncovered - A Conversation with Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Director of Research and Honorary Professor of Roman Studies in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. This in-depth conversation covers Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's groundbreaking archeological work done in Herculaneum and Pompeii, the politics of excavation, and life in the ancient Roman world.Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy.

Science and Pseudoscience

A conversation with Michael Gordin

Introduction

Harnessing the Fringe

Years ago, when I found myself in charge of a theoretical physics institute, I used to receive a steady stream of letters and emails from highly frustrated, would-be-scientific revolutionaries, anxious to tell me about their work.

Typically, they would explain how the scientific community had rejected them out of hand on sociological grounds, simply because their work went too far against the prevailing orthodoxy. Often they would compare their circumstances—if not themselves—to those of Einstein, struggling away in secret with his transformative ideas about the universe while working at a Swiss patent office. Inevitably, too, it might bear mentioning, they were all men.

I quickly learned that any physicist who has ever been in any position of authority anywhere has received a significant number of such letters. The most common response is to simply ignore them. My approach was always to write back a short reply thanking them for their time and effort, but explaining that I didn’t have the time to go through their work in proper detail. If they had, indeed, found some transformative insight, I responded evenly, I urged them to formally submit their results to the appropriate journals for consideration like everybody else.

Of course, this was somewhat duplicitous. I knew very well that the reason they had approached me (in addition to virtually anyone else they could find an email address for) was that no established journal would ever seriously consider wading through their invariably dense wad of notes, let alone publishing it.

What passed for a certain form of politeness, then, was hardly anything that justified my place on a higher moral plane—like everyone else, I, too, hoped that these fringe figures would just go away and leave me alone.

Yet, in the back of my mind, I always wondered. Not, as it happens, that their claims of possessing a revolutionary insight might turn out to be correct—I am sceptical enough to believe that the chances of that happening were, statistically, vanishingly small—but more sociologically speaking: what keeps these people going, day after day, perpetually encountering an unequivocal wall of rejection, if not outright hostility, from the scientific authorities? Why wilfully remain mired on the “outside” of the big tent of science? After all, the global scientific effort is quite different now than it was more than a century ago in Einstein’s day. For anyone anxious to make some sort of a contribution to the scientific effort, there is always somewhere that will accept you to at least do an undergraduate degree, if not a PhD.

The cynical answer is that they are all simply crazy and don’t have the intellectual resources necessary to make their way through even the most basic technical material, let alone a doctoral program somewhere. But something about that response always struck me as being too pat. Doubtless it was the case for some. But likely not all.

So it was with a particular interest that I picked up Michael Gordin’s intriguing book, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. I am old enough to (just barely) remember the name Immanuel Velikovsky, the charismatic rebel who wrote (among others) the bestselling book Worlds in Collision that managed to provocatively combine unbridled scientific speculation with ancient myth.

By all accounts, Velikovsky was a decidedly curious character. The notorious Russian-born doctor–turned psychoanalyst–turned astronomer-historian-autodidact not only had a flair for writing and boatloads of charisma and energy, he also was on record for making a couple of concrete predictions of his radical new theory of the solar system that turned out, much to the dismay of the authorities of the day, to actually be correct.

Here, then, was a specific, compelling, historical instance that could be carefully studied to examine how science had deliberately separated itself from pseudoscience, and why.

The full story of Immanuel Velikovsky turns out to be even more fascinating than one might expect, combining elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, Cold War paranoia, ancient mythology, NASA press conferences, 1960s counterculture and a good deal more besides. It’s not too hard to see why Michael, as a professional historian of science, would pick such a captivatingly good yarn.

But to me, always lurking in the background were the broader issues: How do we distinguish science from pseudoscience? How should we? Is science too conservative? Too liberal? Can we improve its process? Can we learn from the past?

So when I got the chance to catch up with Michael face to face, I was anxious to steer the conversation towards those more general questions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out that he was as well.

One of the first things he wanted to mention was that, in stark contrast to contemporary scientific dogma, Karl Popper’s famous falsifiability criterion is hardly the magic bullet to meaningfully distinguish science from pseudoscience.

“It’s a very appealing criterion. Except it’s got a couple of problems. The first problem is, How do you know that you falsified something? If it were the case that every time an experiment with a null result meant that you’d falsified something, then everything we know about physics and chemistry will be wrong because high school students around the world have failed to replicate it. So you have to do the experiment right. But how do you know you’ve done the experiment right, unless you get ‘the right result’?

“The second problem is that any valuable demarcation criterion has to cut the world in the right place: we want to make sure that all the things that we regard as science are scientific, and those things that we think of as ‘fringe’ or ‘pseudo’ are not. It should divide that well. The problem is that there are lots of sciences which have a very hard time coming up with falsifying instances—in particular, the historically-engaged sciences like evolutionary theory, geology, cosmology and so forth. You can’t rerun the tape. If someone tells you, ‘The universe was created this way,’ and you respond, ‘Well, but what’s the falsifiable statement?’ it’s awfully hard to find one.

“The third problem with Popper’s criterion is a philosophical one: it requires you to not believe in truth. Consistently applying it means that nothing is ever true: scientists make no true claims. I can’t say, ‘This chair is made of atoms’. I can only say, ‘No one has disproved the claim that this chair is made of atoms, yet.’ It’s a very uncomfortable position to be in long term.”

Michael believes that there is, in principle, no obvious “bright line of demarcation” that we can use to separate science from pseudoscience. But, contrary to what you might suppose, he hardly finds this disturbing.

In fact, he believes that by consistently exhibiting a willingness to engage (albeit in a limited way) with “the fringe”, we might well be furthering the cause of mainstream science.

“I’m actually quite comfortable with the fact that there’s no bright line. I understand why it makes some people antsy, but on the other hand, you also want there to be weird thinking at the edges.

“Letting stuff float on the fringes is a way of getting new ideas and occasionally sharpening one’s critical abilities. Durin...