In this recent incarnation, Senator Tom Coburn (R.-OK) is castigating studies funded by the National Science Foundation which seem silly or frivolous to outsiders to bolster his cred as an anti-waste, anti-tax crusader. He has repeated called for the elimination of the NSF altogether, although he has no idea where American scientists would get their funding if he did so. In past years, the charge was led by Rep. John Dingell (D.-MI), who has served in the House since 1955, the longest serving member of the current Congress. A generation ago, it was Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who replaced Joe McCarthy in the Senate and served for 44 years. Proxmire created the famous “Golden Fleece” awards, which publicize what he regards as useless research. Or take a recent quote from that paragon of education and science, Sarah Palin, is in the same vein: “Some of these pet projects, they don’t really make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good, things like fruit fly research.”

The Palin quote, however, reveals the problem with the whole issue of outsiders criticizing science funding: ignorance of scientific research and its context. Anyone who has had any real exposure to biology (as Palin obviously has not) knows that for over a century, the fruit fly has been the model organism of genetics, since it is easy to study and breed, and its genes work wonderfully for research. Fruit flies have taught us more about genetics and evolution than studies on just about any other animal. The same problem permeates all these debates: many areas of science seem obscure to the layman, and don’t seem worthwhile, but in the context of a particular research discipline, they are important or significant.

As the article goes on to point out:

But there’s more to duh research than meets the eye. Experts say they have to prove the obvious — and prove it again and again — to influence perceptions and policy.

“Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,” said Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. “There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough.”

Indeed, people are still arguing about cigarettes almost 50 years after the U.S. surgeon general first linked their use to cancer and lung disease. In a recent issue of the Canadian Medical Assn. Journal, a detailed analysis painstakingly laid out a notion that most take for granted: that secondhand smoke in cars is bad for children.

Duh.

Or consider the case of Harvard sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler, who has spent about $3 million over the years demonstrating over and over that doctors who don’t get enough sleep make mistakes on the job.

This seems painfully clear. But getting the medical establishment to start believing it — much less change the rules governing doctors’ working hours — has taken Czeisler the better part of three decades. Long shifts for interns and residents are a staple of hospital culture.

When Czeisler presented evidence that workers on rotating shifts at a chemical plant suffered on disrupted sleep, the medical establishment said that doctors were different. When he published results showing that physicians’ 24-hour-plus shifts contributed to car accidents and attention lapses at work, some acknowledged it might be true — but not for them.

Everyone had an anecdote. Czeisler had data. “It was dismissed out of hand,” he said. “They use the same argument over and over, even when we’ve tested it. It drives me up the wall.”

In 2008, the Institute of Medicine issued guidelines calling for limiting interns’ and residents’ shifts to 16 consecutive hours. Last year, authorities did cut back to 16 hours — but only for interns. Why? In part because that’s who Czeisler had studied.

“I was astonished,” said Czeisler, who is now researching whether residents’ performance also is affected by lack of sleep. “I can’t believe we have to do this extra study.”

There’s another reason why studies tend to confirm notions that are already widely held, said Daniele Fanelli, an expert on bias at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Instead of trying to find something new, “people want to draw attention to problems,” especially when policy decisions hang in the balance, he said.

In addition, studies that seem to be confirming the obvious are not so trivial as the media and politicians portray them. Many ideas which we consider everyday wisdom turn out to be wrong—and it takes studies like these to demonstrate the falsity of commonly-held beliefs. Or just to test the hypothesis in the first place, so even if it is confirmed, it is has at least been tested, and it’s not just folk wisdom. Ideally, science should be testing any and all ideas, whether they seem to be common sense or not, because in many cases what we think is common sense turns out to be wrong once scientists have worked on it. After all, your common sense tells you that the sun moves around the earth, that the earth is flat, and that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects—all ideas which have proven false when scientists examined them. Much of science (whether relativity or quantum mechanics or molecular biology or cosmology) is so specialized and hard to explain to the lay man that they are almost impossible to render on commonsensical layman’s explanations without grossly oversimplifying.

Commonly, you will hear politicians and the media criticizing science that just seems obscure to them, often with cries for restricting funding just to practical research that can be made immediately useful to humans. But again, the layperson is in no position to judge what is good research in nuclear physics or in molecular biology, since they know little or nothing about it. Most of the time, the critics of science don’t even try to critique research in highly specialized fields like nuclear physics or molecular biology—yet they feel expert enough in fields like psychology and sociology to critique those kinds of research, even though such research is vetted just as rigorously by the peer review process as research in fields laymen have no clue about.

That’s the crucial point: unless you are qualified by specialized professional training to criticize a particular type of research, you cannot render a useful judgment over what’s good science and what’s bad science. That is the job of the scientific community itself, which polices itself using peer review to fund only the research that meets the highest standards of a given specialty. Peer review isn’t perfect, and not everything that is funded is great science, but it is the best device we have to screen out less important and worthwhile research in the judgment of scientific experts qualified in a given field. And I know from personal experience that most funding is not frivolously thrown away. In my career, I’ve gotten funding consistently from the NSF, and even flown to D.C. to be on panels that screen out the proposals and the mountains of reviews that were generated. It’s brutal. In my branch, at best about 20% of the proposals get funded. That means that 80% of the proposals (many of which are outstanding research, proposed by well-regarded scientists) get turned down just because the competition is so stiff and the funds for scientific research are so scarce. In the last cycle of Sedimentary Geology and Paleontology (my branch) only 10% were funded; 90% were turned down no matter how good they were simply because the funds were so limited. Would you want to waste months of your time and effort to write a pre-proposal, wait for the OK,  and then send in proposal, knowing that the odds are only 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 that it will be funded? That’s the dilemma that faces many scientists, and yet they are under continual pressure to keep the grant funding coming, and maintain their research careers in this highly competitive atmosphere.

So keep these things in mind when you hear yet another superficial story in the media or from a politician or  reporter who doesn’t really understand how science works.

It happens with disgusting regularity. You will flip through the various basic cable channels which are nominally “science oriented” (often grouped together on the dial if they feature scientific topics) and come up with nothing but junk, pseudoscience, and worse. “Reality shows” about subjects with little or no science content, tons of paranormal and pseudoscientific shows promoting ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and creationism—all fill the airwaves for channels like Discovery, The  Learning Channel, History Channel, and even the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel. We watch a few minutes of these with complaints to anyone within earshot, then (usually) move on—or occasionally we get sucked in to watch the whole thing, like gawkers at a car crash. The cartoon at the top (from the great website PhdComics) says it all: four channels that used to be largely documentaries on science and history are now dominated  by guns, explosions, dangerous occupations and other “reality” TV. Their shows have  buzz words in the titles like “biggest”, “wildest”, “monsters” or “killers”, and plain old junk fill up most of their air time.

I’ve seen it from both sides. I’ve appeared in prehistoric animal documentaries that have aired on all four channels (and keep re-appearing years after I made them, so I feel like Dorian Gray, with my younger self perpetually preserved in documentary limbo). Almost all these documentaries are made by small independent film outfits that are searching for any sexy topic that they can sell to the major cable networks, so they are under great pressure to come up with something flashy, noisy, scary, and/or mysterious. If I  have any chance to review the script, I try my best to tone down the excessive hyperbole, but they usually ignore me. As I film segments with them, I try to be as dynamic and entertaining as a “talking head” can be, but they are always pushing me to oversimplify and exaggerate to make the spiel more colorful (but less scientifically accurate). And then when I see the final product, most of what I did ends up on the cutting room floor, with only a few seconds left of many hours of filming. Even worse, I’ve put in many  hours on projects that never got picked up at all. Documentary filmmaking is a high-risk, low-reward proposition—you have better odds of making big money in Vegas.

So we all complain about the changes in our basic cable channels, and wonder why such dreck can make it on the air, but seldom think hard about the process. But the excellent website TVTropes does a very nice job analyzing what happens to TV networks over time. To no one’s surprise, it comes down to one simple factor: ratings (and therefore money from advertisers), largely driven by the effort to woo those big-spending trend-setting 18-31 male viewers who already dictate the movie industry’s bottom line (although movies aim even lower to reach teenage boys, the biggest-spending and most loyal movie audience). As TVTropes points out (and those of us old enough to remember can attest to), it wasn’t always this bad on cable TV. When the laws changed and the opportunity to create hundreds of basic cable channels first emerged in the 1980s, the channels were initially set up to fill specific programming niches, from the Golf Channel to the Game Show Network and so on. In the early 1980s, all these new niche-driven cable channels were very distinct and more or less true to their niche description. But since these are commercial channels that must sell ads based on numbers of viewers, the same factors that affect every other commercial enterprise came into play: keep tweaking it and give the customer whatever sells the most. (This dynamic does not apply to non-commercial stations like PBS in the U.S., or the BBC in Britain, which can program what they feel is in the public interest).

As TVTropes documents, nearly all these niche-defined networks have undergone “network decay” since they were founded in the 1980s, as their programming shifts to find hit shows. Because they are nearly all chasing nearly the same demographic of 18-31 year old males, they end up programming a lot of the same kinds of things (or even the same shows). Their original mission and distinctive programming is lost in a sea of reality shows and junk that keeps you in your seat, whether it be explosions or dangerous occupations or whatever. Another factor has been the expansion of media conglomerates, so that these multiple cable channels are owned by just a few corporations, and the CEO of each channel must answer to corporate bosses who are only interested in their profitability, not any abstract “mission” to air certain types of programming. So much for the high-minded idealism that drove the deregulation of the airwaves in the 1970s and 1980s, with the intent of offering us dozens of distinct choices. Instead, they all “decay” to a lowest-common-denominator of “if it bleeds, it leads” bottom-line mentality, negating whatever real advantages that dozens of distinctive niche cable channels once offered. As TVTropes points out, the decisions are made by network execs worried only about their ratings and bottom lines, not any high-minded ideal like “quality television” that PBS brags so loudly about. They could (and did) notice that professional “wrestling” is popular with their 18-31 male demographic, and see no problem with programming the WWE next to a show about science.

TVTropes offers as a classic example the pioneering channel MTV, which single-handedly changed the music business in the early 1980s and made telegenic pop artists into big stars (e.g., Michael Jackson, Madonna) while ending the careers of less telegenic musicians (e.g., Christopher Cross). But soon MTV found it was more profitable to offer reality shows, cartoons, game shows, and many other kinds of programming until the original music videos that it pioneered have vanished altogether.  TVTropes analyzed the decay of the cable channels in various categories. Under “Total Abandonment” (of their original mission) they list not only MTV, A&E, G4, CMT, Biography, and The Learning Channel (TLC). In their words:

TLC, originally focusing around science and nature documentaries in the style of the Discovery Channel, drifted toward almost nothing but “home makeover”-style reality shows. In a somewhat confusing (in these days of internet porn) play at grabbing the all-important 18-30 male demographic, TLC acquired the rights to air the Miss America pageant. After sufficient decay, one would never guess that TLC used to be called The Learning Channel and was once co-owned by NASA.

One need only check here to see how far TLC has drifted away from “learning” and into the realm of bizarre sensationalism, or this hilarious send-up of their programming.

Under the category “Slipped”, we find The History Channel. As TVTrope comments:

[Their] programming now consists of roughneck-focused reality shows (Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men) and conspiracy theory “documentaries” about UFOs, the Bible Code, ghosts, Atlantis, Nostradamus, and the end of the world, earning the network the derisive nickname “The Hysterical Channel”. Heck, at least the “Hitler Channel,” as they used to be known (back when everything was about either World War II, Nazis or The American Civil War), was actual history.

Their analysis of Discovery Channel is even more hilarious:

The Discovery Channel still shows plenty of actual documentary material, despite having been decaying for almost as long as MTV has. In the late 80s the lineup was mostly serious documentaries, the most famous of which was Wings (no relation to the sitcom except for a focus on aircraft) but which also included classy repackaged BBC imports like Making of a Continent — and once a year there was Shark Week, which was just what you’d expect. By the mid-1990s, they showed an obscene amount of home improvement shows and cooking shows aimed at stay-at-home moms (enough to spawn the spin-off Discovery Home & Leisure Channel, now Planet Green) and Wings had proven so popular it had been farmed out to its own spin-off, Discovery Wings Channel (now Military Channel). Now, they’re being swamped with “guys building and/or blowing things up” shows in the vein of Mythbusters and Monster Garage. And about four different shows about credulous idiots with no critical thinking skills ghost hunters. In 2005, Discovery debuted Cash Cab, a game show that takes place in the back of a cab, leaving one unsure whether it even has a theme beyond “non-fiction”. It gets weird when you realize that they’re knocking some of their own shows off, especially Mythbusters into Smash Lab (with a focus on safety measures) and How It’s Made into Some Assembly Required. The latter has almost only done products featured in the former (though How It’s Made has been on for just about ten years, so it’s hard to find something they haven’t done). The Discovery Channel also used to contain a lot of nature, which is where the now-classic Shark Week (which they still air regularly) originated from. But it seems that explosions have taken the place of tigers ripping stuff to pieces. Most of the nature shows have since been relegated to Animal Planet.

Finally, the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel are the only two that still run mostly science documentaries with little junk, yet National Geographic still has “The Bounty Hunter,” “Is it Real?”, and “The Dog Whisperer.”  Science Channel has begun airing sci-fi programming, including “Firefly” and “Dark Matters: Twisted but True,” so they are running pop-pseudoscience garbage that now pollutes The History Channel.

Frankly, I don’t see any light at the end of this tunnel. As long as these are commercial TV channels, they are driven by ratings and lowest-common-denominator programming aimed at 18-31 men. Only PBS and other non-commercial stations can escape this “network decay”—but then they compensate by annoying pledge drives that rerun old shows with sentimental value so that viewers will tune in and hopefully donate. Maybe the BBC, with its government support of top-quality science and drama programming (which the U.S. market then borrows or rips off) seems immune, although there are BBC channels that are lowbr0w as well. After all, Benny Hill reruns have done well on American TV for years….

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The Geological Society of America (GSA) is one of the largest organizations of geologists in the world (over 24,000 members). It holds not only an annual meeting every fall in a different city, but also five regional meetings around the U.S. regions (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountains, and Cordilleran) throughout the year. Although 97 different countries contribute members, it is composed mostly of U.S., Canadian, and some Central American geologists. The GSA focuses on the cutting-edge and pure research aspects of geology, performed mostly by academics and government geologists. Thus, it is very different from meetings of petroleum geologists or mining geologists or engineering geologists, who tend to be employed in for-profit enterprises and focus on purely practical local problems. The annual GSA meeting routinely draws 6000 or more people for a four-day session, so there are over 2000 talks and posters in at least 30 different sessions with talks every 15 minutes in at least 30 different rooms scattered around some  huge convention center. There SO much to see and hear for a broadly trained and wide-ranging geologist/ paleontologist like myself that I can’t even catch a fraction of what I want to see and hear. For me, it is crucial to make the annual meeting each year to keep up with the latest developments, as well as see old friends that I see only at the meetings, and also to keep up with my geology textbooks and my other books sold in the gigantic exhibits area. I attended my first meeting in 1978 in Toronto, and I have not missed a national GSA since then. I just returned from this fall’s meeting in Minneapolis October 9-12, which was my 33rd in a row.

Most of the time when I attend the meetings, there are plenty of controversial topics and great debates going on within the geological community, so the profession does not suppress unorthodox opinions or play political games. This is the way it should be in any genuine scientific discipline. I’ve seen amazingly confrontational knock-down-drag-out sessions about particularly hotly debated ideas, but always conducted in a spirit of honest scientific exchange and always hewing to rules of science and naturalism. To get on the meeting program, scientists must propose to organize sessions around particular themes, along with field trips to geologically interesting sites within driving distance of the convention city, and the GSA host committee reads and approves these proposals. But every once in a while, I see a poster title and abstract with something suspicious about it. When I check the authors, they turn out to be Young-Earth Creationists (YEC) who claim the earth is only 6000 years old and all of geology can be explained by Noah’s flood. When I visit the poster session, it’s usually mobbed by real geologists giving the YECs a real grilling, even though the poster is ostensibly about some reasonable geologic topic, like polystrate trees in Yellowstone, and there is no overt mention of Noah’s flood in the poster. But the 2010 meeting last year in Denver took the cake: there was a whole field trip run by YECs who did not identify their agenda, and pretended that they were doing conventional geology—until you read between the lines.

I never even spotted them on the field trip on the program. I was teaching a heavy load last fall, and had no spare time for pre- or post-meeting trips (four days away from classes is hard enough to arrange), so I didn’t look the trips over closely. But my colleague Steve Newton did notice the suspicious list of leaders, including Institute of Creation “Research” (ICR) “geologist” Steve Austin, Marcus Ross of Jerry Falwell’s fundamentalist Liberty University, and two others from the ICR and another Christian college. He reported on it here, and according to him, it was an eye-opening experience. Through the entire trip, the leaders never identified themselves as YECs or openly advocated Noah’s flood or a 6000-year-old earth. Instead, the entire trip was filled with stops at outcrops where the leaders emphasized the possible evidence for sudden deposition of the strata at Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs, without stating explicitly that they believed this sudden deposition was Noah’s flood in action. (There are LOTS of instances of local rapid and sudden deposition of strata in real geology, but they are local and clearly cannot be linked to any global flood). As Newton described it:

Furthermore, the field trip leaders were careful not to make overt creationist references. If the 50 or so field trip participants did not know the subtext and weren’t familiar with the field trip leaders, it’s quite possible that they never realized that the leaders endorsed geologic interpretations completely at odds with the scientific community. Even the GSA Sedimentary Geology Division had initially signed on as a sponsor of the trip (though they backed out once they learned the views of the trip leaders).

But the leaders’ Young-Earth Creationist views were apparent in rhetorical subtleties. For example, when Austin referred to Cambrian outcrops, he described them as rocks that are “called Cambrian.” It’s an odd phrasing, allowing use of the proper geologic term while subtly denying its implications. In one instance, when Austin was asked by a trip attendee about the age of a rock unit, he responded somewhat cryptically, “Wherever you want to go there.” Such phrasing was telling, if you knew what to listen for.

Subtext about the age of formations was a big part of the Young-Earth Creationist rhetoric on the trip. As we moved on to each field trip stop, a narrative began to emerge: the creationist concept of Noah’s Flood as explanation for the outcrops. Although no one uttered the words “Noachian Flood,” the guides’ descriptions of the geology were revealing and rather coy. For example, at the first stop—a trail off Highway 24 near Manitou Spring—Austin stated that the configuration of the units was “the same over North America,” and had been formed by a massive marine transgression. “Whatever submerged the continent,” Austin went on, it must have been huge in scale.

Apparently, most of the participants on the field trip who weren’t familiar with YEC assumptions and terminology never caught on to the scam that was being perpetrated by the field trip leaders—and none were converted to the YEC viewpoint by a single weird field trip. But conversion and witnessing to unbelievers is not the goal here. The purpose is to get YEC “research” presented at respectable mainstream scientific meetings so they can claim they are doing legitimate “scientific research”—even if they lie about or conceal their motives to do so, and mislead the GSA and the geological community by hiding their real agenda. During the poster sessions at that same meeting, there were no less than four posters by students from fundamentalist Cedarville University challenging the idea that the classic Permian sand dune deposits of the Coconino Sandstone below the rim of the Grand Canyon were laid down in in the wind and not water—because that’s a major dilemma for the YEC in trying to shoehorn the entire Grand Canyon into “flood geology” (see my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, Chapter 3, for a detailed critique of the idiocy of “flood geology”).

Even more bizarre was one of the presentations given by Marcus Ross of Liberty University, who did conventional research on Cretaceous mosasaurs (huge marine monitor lizards) and ammonites for his legitimate Ph.D. at the University of Rhode Island. As Newton described it:

“Millions of years” was a phrase that also appeared in Ross’ talk on Late Cretaceous marine stratigraphy; many of his slides used normal geologic time, with millions of years clearly labeled on axes. Nothing in his 15-minute talk hinted at nonstandard geologic thinking. Because most of the audience probably did not know Ross’ background, it must have been puzzling to them when the first question following Ross’ talk challenged him on how he could “harmonize this work with [his] belief in a 6,000-year-old Earth.” (This question came from University of Florida geology professor Joe Meert, who blogged about the exchange.)

Ross answered the question by saying that for a scientific meeting such as GSA, he thought in a “framework” of standard science; but for a creationist audience, he said, he used a creationist framework. Judging from the reaction of the audience, this answer caused more confusion than enlightenment. Ross pointed out that nothing in his presentation involved Young-Earth Creationism. But he then volunteered that he was indeed a Young-Earth Creationist.

It was a strange moment for the audience. It was the last talk of the session, and as everyone migrated into the hallway, several people asked me what had just happened, as if they had misheard the exchange.

What to do about this situation? Steven Newton argues (rightly in my opinion) that at professional meetings YEC should be allowed to give presentations as long as they are clearly following the rules of science (at least in their abstracts). They deserve to be debated and confronted but we don’t want to get in the game of censoring or rejecting them as non-scientists as long as their abstracts approach their topics in a scientific and professional manner. If we reject them beforehand,  they can legitimately claim that they are being victimized and unfairly censored by conventional scientists who won’t give them a fair hearing. However, in a peer-reviewed paper, the reviewers should take them to task if they are using non-scientific methods or assumptions. I know of only a few YEC papers in conventional journals that survived peer-review—and only by doing completely conventional research and making no mention of their YEC assumptions or goals.

Sadly, the real problem here is that YEC “geologists” come back from this meeting falsely braggingthat their “research” was enthusiastically received, and that they “converted” a lot of people to their unscientific views. As Newton pointed out, they will crow in their publicity that they are attending regular professional meetings and presenting their research successfully. For those who don’t know any better, it sounds to the YEC audience like they are conventional geologists doing real research and that they deserve to be taken seriously as geologists—even though every aspect of their geology is patently false (see Chapter 3 in my 2007 Evolution book). And so, once more the dishonesty of the YEC takes advantage of the openness and freedom of the scientific community to exploit it to their own ends, and abuse the privilege of open communication to push anti-scientific nonsense on the general population that doesn’t know the difference.

P.Z. Myers said it best on his recent blog“The Fundamental Cowardice of Creationists”:

I’m sure that the creationists will cry that he had to do this, because science defends a dogmatic orthodoxy and won’t let them speak otherwise. This is totally false. If someone wants to defend heterodox ideas, they should state them openly, not hide them and present theories they do not believe so they can acquire false authority in a field, as Ross tries to do, or so that they can lie and pretend that they had convinced an audience, as Austin did.

And that’s all Marcus Ross is trying to do. He’s trying to build up credibility by presenting all of the data and interpreting it in a rational framework (he learned something at URI!) at scientific meetings, only so he can turn around and spend that reputation to endorse laughable absurdities at creationist meetings. It is contemptible.

Addendum: I checked the program of our October meeting just held in Minneapolis, and they were not on the field trip schedule (whew!).

But my favorite talk was Eugenie Scott’s presentation, “Deja Vu all over again: Denialism of Climate Change and Evolution.” It gave me a sense of deja vu, because apparently without knowledge of each others’ work, we have converged on a common topic. This is what philosopher William Whewell would call a “consilience” or common agreement of different lines of evidence or threads of argument. As I independently pointed out in my upcoming book written last summer about science denialism, entitled Reality Check, and in a paper I wrote which is now in press, there are tremendous parallels between the evolution-deniers (creationists), the climate change deniers, and many other types of science deniers. Even more striking, they borrow most of their tactics from the prototypical reality deniers, the Holocaust revisionists, along with the tactics of the tobacco companies in creating “doubt” through PR to obscure the real science.

Consider the following:

• This scientific consensus about this idea is accepted by 95-99% of all the scientists who work in the relevant fields;
• This scientific topic threatens the viewpoints of certain groups in the U.S., so it is strongly opposed by them and people they influence;
• Their anti-scientific viewpoint is extensively promoted by websites and publications of right-wing fundamentalist institutes such as the Discovery Institute in Seattle, and often plugged by Fox News;
• The opponents of this consensus cannot find legitimate scientists with expertise in the field who oppose the consensus of qualified scientists, so they beat the bushes for “scientists” (none of whom have relevant training or research credentials) to compose a phony “list of scientists who disagree with Topic X”;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus resort to taking quotes out of context to make legitimate scientists sound like they question the consensus;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus often look for small disagreements among scholars within the field to argue that the entire field does not support their major conclusions;
• Deniers often pick on small errors by individuals to argue that the entire field is false;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus often take small examples or side issues that do not seem to support the consensus and use these to argue that the consensus is false;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus spend most of their energies disputing the scientific evidence, rather than doing original research themselves;
• By loudly proclaiming their “alternate theories” and getting their paid PR people to question the scientific consensus in the media, they manage to get the American public confused and doubtful, so less than half of US citizens accept what 99% of legitimate scientists in this field of research consider to be true;
• By contrast, most modern industrialized nations (Canada, nearly all of Europe, China, Japan, Singapore, and many others) have no problems with the scientific consensus, and treat it as a matter of fact in both their education and in their economic and political decisions;
• Powerful politicians have used the controversy over this issue to try to force changes in the teaching of this topic in schools;

Reading through this list, most people would immediately assume that it only describes the creationists and their attempts to target the scientific consensus on evolution. Indeed, the list does describe creationists or “evolution denialists”—but it also describes the actions of the climate denialists (who deny global climate change is real and human caused) as well. In fact, the membership lists of creationists and climate-change deniers is highly overlapping, with both causes being promoted by right-wing political candidates, news media (especially Fox News), and religious/political organizations like the Discovery Institute and many others.

The one big difference between them is motivation. Creationists are motivated exclusively by strong fundamentalist literalist religious beliefs; most AGW (anthropogenic global warming) deniers are motivated by right-wing political and economic ideologies, which view environmentalism as a threat to unrestrained capitalism and freedom to do whatever we damn well please (including polluting and destroying our planet). As Oreskes and Conway (2010) brilliantly document, AGW denialism did not exist as a serious movement until about a decade ago, when various right-wing and libertarian think tanks (Marshall Institute, Heartland Institute, Cato Institute), heavily funded by energy companies with vested interests in denying AGW, began a concerted PR campaign to discredit the overwhelming evidence and the conclusions of 95% of the climate science community. Because there were almost no climate scientists who denied the evidence for AGW, the PR specialists recruited among scientists not trained in climate research, and compiled phony lists of “dissenting scientists” (most of whom have no advanced degree, or their degree is not in climate science). This is comparable to the way creationists compile phony lists of “scientists dissenting from evolution,” which turns out to be mostly people with degrees completely irrelevant to evolution, like engineering and physics, rather than evolutionary biology or molecular genetics or geology. The NCSE brilliantly satirized this ridiculous PR exercise by creating “Project Steve”, which showed that there are more scientists with the name “Steve” or “Stephen” or “Stephanie” (over 1100 so far, which is less than 1% of the total population of scientists) than the total number of “scientists disputing evolution.”

I could go on and on with documentation of the other similarities between evolution-deniers and AGW-deniers, but the space in this column is limited. Most of it is provided by Oreskes and Conway (2010), and spelled out in my two upcoming publications in even greater detail. The only good news I can see in this regard is that the U.S. is almost alone in its anti-scientific attitudes toward both evolution—and AGW. Almost all the other industrialized nations in western Europe and Asia have accepted it long ago, were enthusiastic signatories at the Copenhagen Conference, and are actively involved in working to reduce their carbon footprints. More revealing is the fact that numerous relatively conservative or non-ideological institutions also accept the reality of climate change. This includes the insurance companies and their re-insurers (like Swiss Re), many other major businesses, emergency management agencies at every level, and even the U.S. military (hardly a bastion of liberalism). These organizations don’t have the luxury of playing political games. They’ve read the scientific consensus and must plan for the future. If they can see the matter so clearly, why can’t we? Just like in our lack of an energy policy and dependence on foreign oil, it looks like the U.S. will be the last major country dragged into facing reality after the rest of the world  has already jumped ahead of us and prepared for it—and invested heavily in clean energy development and preparation for climate change while we wasted time in an unnecessary battle between accepted science and ideological PR.

There is one other other ray of light: Eugenie Scott announced at TAM9 that the National Center for Science Education will now be fighting not only for good evolutionary science to be taught in schools, but also climate science as well. And her announcement got a huge round of applause from the TAM9 audience, which would not have happened a few years ago when there were still a lot of AGW deniers at TAM.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
—Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 2003

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
—Richard Feynman

What’s real is what’s real, and, like it or not, no one can change the nature of reality. Except, of course, with mushrooms.
—Bill Maher

130 scientists work at SETI, doing much more than you think you know.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. I had a couple hours to spare, so planetary scientist Dr. Franck Marchis invited me to swing by for a quick tour. I reluctantly (not) accepted.

There was an obvious elephant in the room. The news had been reporting that SETI had lost its funding, and since I (like most people) assumed that SETI consisted of 4 or 5 people in a crappy rented office somewhere, I was expecting to find those 4 or 5 people packing boxes and getting ready to move out, and polishing their resumes to get “real jobs” somewhere. I quickly learned that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

What I didn’t know, and am now a bit embarrassed to admit, is that I was unaware of everything SETI does except one thing. They listen for signals from technological civilizations on other planets. Yes, they do indeed do that; using the Allen radio telescope array (named for its primary sponsor, Paul Allen). The Allen telescope is what lost its $2.5 million annual funding, and that does indeed impact SETI’s work. But it impacts one small part of what SETI actually does.

Frank Drake's office at SETI. This is like church for many geeks.

SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) does a lot more. Their charter is, in essence, based on the Drake Equation. The Drake Equation calculates how many intelligent civilizations are out there. It looks like this:

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R^* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy

f_p = the fraction of those stars that have planets

n_e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

f_ℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point

f_i = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life

f_c = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

That’s a lot of variables. Any branch of science that falls within any one of those variables is within SETI’s charter. I went not to an office with 4 or 5 frazzled people, but to a beautiful office building entirely populated with 130+ scientists all working on projects that impact one or more of those variables. I met a guy studying whale languages, someone characterizing the surface of Mars, and of course Franck, who specializes in asteroids that have broken in half and have become twin asteroids. Astrobiology is everywhere you look in the building. And all of it – all of it – is optimized for education and outreach. SETI is not just a national treasure; it’s a human treasure.

This is where the SETI folks sit to control the Allen telescope array. Note the screens are dark. Note that's a problem.

Although the Allen telescope is in jeopardy (it’s currently surviving in skeleton-crew mode for maintenance), the SETI Institute itself covers countless research projects, funded by many grants from many sources, both public and private. SETI is not going out of business. In fact, I’ve been in touch with them and we’re trying to set up a talk. They give free-to-the-public talks every month in their beautiful conference center.

I can’t stress this hard enough, and I wouldn’t be able to if I hadn’t seen it first-hand: SETI will blow your mind. It’s not going away, and you could spend a day marveling at any one of its many branches.

That’s not to say that the Allen telescope’s financial crisis doesn’t suck. It does. And it impacts SETI’s ability to continue work on its most PR-worthy project, the analysis of radio signals. All of the other work, narrowing down the other variables in the Drake Equation, is independently important too; but if we can’t point the telescopes to where we think the signals might be coming from, it’s like building an exotic race car and not putting gas in the tank. Other work in astronomy has been discovering exoplanets at a stupid rate. We’ve got more leads than ever before, and just when we need them most, we can’t point our radio telescopes to listen.

Take a look at this page to learn more about the SETI Institute.

The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

—Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, on “Real Time With Bill Maher”, Feb. 4, 2011

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

—Philip K. Dick, author

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

—Carl Sagan

In recent years, both philosophers and science deniers (such as creationists) have repeatedly attacked the objectivity of science and scientists. Creationists claim that scientists are big frauds, deceived by a mass delusion about evolution. They argue that the stratigraphic sequence of fossils in the rock record is faked by evolutionists who shuffle the fossils and the strata in the order they need to prove evolution, then allegedly point to the same sequence as proof of evolution. (Never mind the fact that the objective, empirical sequence of fossils through geologic time was worked out by devoutly religious naturalists like William Smith and Georges Cuvier before 1800, at least 50 years before evolution was published by Charles Darwin). The Creation “Museum” in Kentucky is built upon the basic premise that “evolution scientists” and “creation scientists” start with the same data, but view them with different assumptions about the world–the fossils cannot speak for themselves, nor can the evidence falsify one position or the other.

On the other hand, philosophers and cultural critics have attacked science as well. Some philosophers have argued that outside reality is an illusion, and we can only know what we personally experience. If we do not perceive it, reality does not exist. More recently, the fad for deconstructionism in the non-scientific realms of academia argues that all our ideas are so culturally based and biased by our human prejudices that we cannot decide what is “real” or “objective.” This argumentation has gone in circles within philosophy for centuries. Philosophers of science, in particular, are fond of telling scientists what they should do, often without finding out what scientists actually do.

For the most part, scientists themselves have largely ignored these debates swirling around their activities. Rather than agonize over what method they should be using, or whether they are being truly objective, most scientists just get to work and produce results. Although some working scientists are familiar with the debates among philosophers of science, most are not, and it doesn’t seem to reduce their scientific productivity a bit. This raises a larger question: How do we know what scientists do, and what science tells us, is real or not? Is it all an illusion? Is it just the product of cultural expectations? There are many good arguments against the idealist/solipsist position or the deconstructionist ideas as well, but the simplest ones are these:

1. BECAUSE IT WORKS. Science produces tangible results upon which other science and technology can be built–and our entire modern civilization is a product of this. If scientific ideas were merely based on a cultural or philosophical illusions, we would not have the huge advances in technology or medicine or computers or transportation or any of many other modern benefits that science provides us. In particular, we would all still be living short, brutish and nasty lives and dying of diseases or infections that have largely been conquered by modern medicine. As Carl Sagan put it, “If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate.”
2. BECAUSE SCIENCE IS SELF-POLICING. Individual scientists can be biased or deluded, or fudge their data, or cherry-pick what they want to believe. As the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” But in a true scientific community, the process of peer-review largely screens out the garbage from the good stuff. Peer-review is not perfect, and there are exceptions to this rule, such as papers which are not as carefully scrutinized as they should be. But unlike almost any other field of human endeavor, good science has a strict procedure of subjecting one’s ideas to the critiques of others with expertise in the topic. This prevents widespread publication of ideas or data until they have passed through this strict gantlet. By and large it works very well. Even if questionable ideas make it through the process of publication, the scientific community will continue to test and re-examine and try to replicate important ideas, often for years afterward, so once an idea has stood the test of time it is very likely to be a real observation about the world.
3. BECAUSE SCIENCE TELLS US “INCONVENIENT TRUTHS.” If the process of science were all a delusion based on our biases and preconceptions and wishes, it would not give us answers that we don’t like or agree with. Yet scientists often discover things that go against our belief systems, but they must put aside their favorite ideas and face this reality. When Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the earth (and us) are not in the center of the universe, the idea wasn’t accepted by the Church or the world in general—but it was true. Everyone except a handful of religious nuts and the uneducated now look at the sun “rising” and “setting” and accept the counterintuitive notion that it is the earth turning instead. When Darwin showed that life had evolved and that we are all closely related to other living things, not specially created, it offended many people (and still does)—but its truth was soon acknowledged by the entire scientific community and nearly all educated Westerners who weren’t religiously biased, even before Darwin died. As the web cartoon puts it: “Science: if you ain’t pissing people off, you ain’t doin’ it right”.

Science tells us what we don’t want to hear, and doesn’t necessarily confirm our biases. The first panel portrays the Greek scientist and mathematician Archimedes, killed by a Roman soldier who didn’t realize he was beheading the smartest man in the ancient world. The LHC is in the penultimate panel refers to the “Large Hadron Collider” and the silly idea that somehow it would cause an atomic catastrophe—which it didn’t. (Cartoon courtesy abstrusegoose.com).

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet. However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room. I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil. This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process! Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise. And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

Meanwhile, the Republican leaders of the House Science and Technology Committee were also attacking the science of global warming. The agenda for their March 31, 2011 hearing was explicitly arranged to challenge the climate science community and cast doubt on their data about global temperature change. They openly “stacked the deck” with their chosen witnesses, which included such “expert scientific witnesses” as an economist, a lawyer, and a professor of marketing—and Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at University of California Berkeley.

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To geologists, Richard Muller is a well-known name, even though his expertise is primarily in nuclear physics. He has dabbled in a lot of geologic topics over the years with varied success. His efforts to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs by postulating another unseen star in our solar system (the “Nemesis hypothesis”) has been refuted, as were his explanations of a alleged 26-million-year cycle of extinctions by postulating periodic perturbations of comets in the Oort cloud. As I summarized in my 2003 paleontology textbook (Prothero, 2003, Bringing Fossils to Life, Chapter 6, the original data supporting the “periodic extinction” model has long been discredited, so the periodicity is not real. Thus, the mechanisms proposed to explain a non-existent extinction periodicity are now moot as well.

To the global warming deniers, Muller had been an important scientific figure with good credentials who had expressed doubt about the temperature data used to track the last few decades of global warming. Muller was influenced by Anthony Watts, a former TV weatherman (not a trained climate scientist) and blogger who has argued that the data set is mostly from large cities, where the “urban heat island” effect might bias the overall pool of worldwide temperature data. Climate scientists have pointed out that they have accounted for this possible effect already, but Watts and Muller were unconvinced. With $150,000 (25% of their funding) from the Koch brothers (the nation’s largest supporters of climate denial research), as well as the Getty Foundation (their wealth largely based on oil money) and other funding sources, Muller set out to reanalyze all the temperature data by setting up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project. Although only 2% of the data were analyzed by last month, the Republican climate deniers in Congress called him to testify in their March 31 hearing to attack global warming science, expecting him to give them scientific data supporting their biases.

To their dismay, Muller behaved like a real scientist and not an ideologue—he followed his data and told them the truth, not what they wanted to hear. Muller pointed out that his analysis of the data set almost exactly tracked what the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Goddard Institute of Space Science (GISS), and the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK had already published (see figure). Muller testified before the House Committee that:

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was created to make the best possible estimate of global temperature change using as complete a record of measurements as possible and by applying novel methods for the estimation and elimination of systematic biases. We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups. The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine global temperature trends. Despite potential biases in the data, methods of analysis can be used to reduce bias effects well enough to enable us to measure long-term Earth temperature changes. Data integrity is adequate. Based on our initial work at Berkeley Earth, I believe that some of the most worrisome biases are less of a problem than I had previously thought.

The right-wing ideologues were sorely disappointed, and reacted viciously in the political sphere by attacking their own scientist, but Muller’s scientific integrity overcame any biases he might have harbored at the beginning. He “called ‘em as he saw ‘em” and told truth to power. Such scientific backbone is becoming increasingly rare in a political climate where every controversial scientific topic, from evolution to global climate change to stem-cell research, has become highly polarized and ideological. But it speaks well of the scientific process when a prominent skeptic like Muller does his job properly and admits that his original biases were wrong. As reported in the Los Angeles Times :

Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which contributed some funding to the Berkeley effort, said Muller’s statement to Congress was “honorable” in recognizing that “previous temperature reconstructions basically got it right…. Willingness to revise views in the face of empirical data is the hallmark of the good scientific process.”

This is the essence of the scientific method at its best. There may be biases in our perceptions, and we may want to find data that fits our preconceptions about the world, but if science is done properly, we get a real answer, often one we did not expect or didn’t want to hear. That’s the true test of when science is giving us a reality check: when it tells us “an inconvenient truth”, something we do not like, but is inescapable if one follows the scientific method and analyzes the data honestly.

Thomas Henry Huxley said it best over 150 years ago:

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

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On Saturday, February 5, 2011, my audio book producer John Wagner and I took a break from endless hours of my reading aloud (with John editing out my countless mistakes) my next book, The Believing Brain, which ironically includes chapters on UFOs, aliens, and conspiracy theories. Ironic because for this break John and I took what we thought would be an uneventful tour of the beautiful new National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This is definitely a museum well worth visiting for a comprehensive tour of all things atomic. It was originally opened in 1969 as the Sandia Atomic Museum, but then changed in 1973 to the National Atomic Museum to include a broader history of the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and finally morphed into the new building that now houses the collection, which includes replicas of the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs (see photograph), along with a B-29, a B-52, an F-105, an A-7, an Atomic Cannon, a Titan II Rocket, a Minuteman Missile, a Jupiter Missile, a Thor Missile, and hundreds more smaller items inside the museum building itself, including these two amusing early uses of atomic energy for “health” purposes:

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1. The Spectro-Chrome Device, “invented around 1911, was used in the practice of Spectro-Chrome therapy. The inventors believed that every element exhibits a certain color. Ninety-seven percent of a human body is made up of four main elements: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. The color waves of these elements were thought to be blue, red, green, and yellow respectively. Illness was thought to occur when one or more of these colors became out of balance, either too dim or too brilliant. The Spectro-Chrome Device treated the afflicted part of the body with the proper amount of color and light to restore balance in the body. Once balance occurred, the patient should recover.” The operative word here is “should”.

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2. The Revigator: “This large pottery crock was lined with Radium ore. Instructions on the jar suggest that you fill it every night with water and drink an average of six or more glasses daily. After its discovery by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898, Radium was considered a ‘cure-all’ until the early 1920s.” The operative word here is “crock”.

We were also quite impressed with the array of nuclear-tipped missiles, including these two (see below), one of which had been in space and survived the reentry. Can you tell which one?

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Then something really weird happened. As John and I were strolling along the exhibits talking about this and that, I wondered out loud if they had any examples of the sand that was turned into glass in the Trinity atomic bomb test explosion on July 16, 1945 at White Sands, New Mexico. Just then the museum docent who had kindly joined us to offer more detailed narratives to accompany the printed plaques, explained that they did, indeed, have a display of said sand-to-glass fusion, and there it was, beautiful in its horrific creation. We chatted it up with the docent for a time, at which point I asked if it is possible to go to White Sands and see the glass in situ. She said, “no, it has all been taken away.” I said, “who took it away, and where is it?” She responded rhetorically: “Right, who took it, where, and why?” I repeated the question and she repeated the rhetorical answer.

“Uh, what are you saying? Someone secreted it away?” “Yes, right, it’s gone and no one knows where,” she explained unhelpfully. “But someone must know,” I pleaded.

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At this point she hinted that there are many government secrets still surrounding nuclear weapons. Of this I am quite certain, since governments do keep secrets in the interests of national security, but she seemed to be speaking of a different sort of secret. I probed for more examples of such secrets. “When you go outside,” she offered, “you will see a B-29 bomber, like the one that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Look at the serial number on the tail. It says 451748. But if you go inside the cockpit and look behind the pilot seat you will find another serial number for that plane: 451749.”

“Okay, so someone messed up,” I suggested. “After all, the people who spray paint numbers on planes are probably not the engineers who design and build planes for Boeing. So what?”

“Well, I looked into that matter myself when I was restoring the plane,” she continued breathlessly, “and it turns out that plane number 451749 disappeared over the South China Sea in a mysterious explosion in the early 1950s. Supposedly one of the bombs armed itself inside the B-29 and then detonated itself.”

“Is that possible?” I queried, wondering just where this story was going but suspecting it was about to take a dramatic turn into conspiratorial waters.

“Have you ever heard of a bomb arming itself and then detonating itself?” she queried. I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I also signaled to her that I didn’t know much at all about bombs and what they are capable of doing, but then suggested that I could certainly imagine how the same people who spray paint the wrong serial number on the tail of a plane could easily screw up while arming a bomb and cause it to explode. Human error happens not infrequently in operating complex machinery.

“Well, I’ll tell you—that doesn’t happen,” she countered my feeble objections. “That plane was shot down or intentionally destroyed.” Okay, shot down. Intentionally destroyed. By whom, enemy fighter planes or an anti-aircraft missile over enemy territory? “No, it was destroyed by our own government.” Why? “Because the crew saw something.” What? What did they see? “Remember, this was not long after Roswell….”

Okay, here we go, we’re on my turf now! Aliens, UFOs, Roswell, New Mexico. The alien encounter in 1947. The crew, she said, probably had a UFO encounter of some sort, and they were silenced. “Wow, that’s incredible,” I enthused. “How can I look into this further?” At this point my erstwhile conspiratorialist grew quiet, warning me in a voice too fervent by half: “You can try but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I made some calls myself and finally got a hold of a two-star general, who told me ‘I don’t know what happened and you don’t either.’”

“What did you take that to mean?,” I pushed. “He was telling me that if I didn’t drop my investigation of what really happened to plane number 451749, that Men-In-Black would come pay me a visit,” she explained unhesitatingly and with enough dramatis that I would get the message myself.

So…there it is. That’s all I know from my brief visit and having conducted no further investigations. If anyone reading this knows, or knows someone who knows…or who has a Friend-of-a-Friend who knows someone who knows what happened to B-29 plane number 451749, I would really like to know myself. And if there are any M.I.B. out there planning to come visit me, bring an extra pair of those cool black sunglasses for me.

On Tuesday, January 18, 2011, physicist, cosmologist, writer, and science celebrity Stephen Hawking spoke in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium on the subject of “My Brief History,” an autobiographical journey through the life of one of the most famous scientists in history.

Tickets were in such high demand that I had to go as a member of the press, writing for Scientific American, Skeptic, eSkeptic, and Skeptic.com, and even then it wasn’t clear I was getting in to actually hear the lecture until after the press junket that afforded us a photo opportunity to pose with The Great One (see below).

Despite his handicap that prevents him from moving anything but a tiny cheek muscle, Hawking is fiercely independent and insists on writing his own speeches and delivering them sentence by sentence through a computer cursor command that he controls through twitching that one muscle, the movement of which is picked up by a small camera attached to his eye glasses (see close up photo below).

Propped up in his chair with his computer screen in front of him, Hawking delivers the lines of his speech sentence by sentence, which you can hear being commanded by a barely perceptible short buzzing sound that advances the already-written text line by line.

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Hawking’s talk was a mix of anecdotes about his parents and upbringing, his schooling and early education, and his science—all of which have been outlined in countless articles, books, films, and biographies—but it was refreshing to hear it directly from the man himself, who rarely addresses the public about personal matters. Hawking was obviously gifted from early childhood, plus had the support of well-educated parents and opportunities for an excellent education. What he lacked, by his own admission, was motivation to achieve. In fact, Hawking noted that the whole point of going through higher education was to show how little effort was needed to succeed, and he took every advantage his genetics gave him for cognitive superiority to cruise through his courses while hardly lifting a finger.

All that changed when he was diagnosed with ALS, which jump-started his ambitions to roll up his sleeves and get to work on something significant to complete his Ph.D. and provide for his new family before…well, before his inevitable demise that is the prognosis of this disease. Four decades on Hawking remains paralyzed but very much alive, living life to the fullest that he can (Caltech cosmologist Kip Thorne, who hosted the event, recounted a trip to Antarctica that Hawking organized, as well as his well-publicized zero-gravity excursion in the “vomit comet” jet that flies through parabolic arcs that enable brief snippets of weightlessness. Apparently Hawking plans to be one of the first tourists into space aboard one of the developing private space flight companies.

Hawking also has a keen sense of humor, although it isn’t clear that if any of his lines were delivered by anyone else that they would be found funny. His situation is so unique, and his mind so interesting, that audiences seem eager to respond to anything he says that isn’t straight reportage about his life or science.

In previous talks that I have attended by Stephen the Q & A inevitably includes a god question, but in those days Hawking took questions from the floor, which took too long to answer so now he fields questions before the talk from Caltech students, who read them aloud to the audience, followed by Hawking’s prepared answer. Here are the three questions and Hawking’s answers:

Student question #1 from Marc Favata, a Caltech postdoc in physics: “As you well know, one of the major research efforts at Caltech concerns the detection of gravitational-radiation with LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory). When the upgrades to LIGO are complete in the next 5 years or so, we expect to detect multiple gravitational-wave events from merging neutron stars or black holes. Considering the uncertainties in our understanding of the rates at which these mergers happen, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the prospects for LIGO to detect something? More importantly, could you speculate on what might be some of the ‘big surprises’ that could come from gravitational-wave observations?

Hawking: “There is uncertainty in the rate of black hole or neutron star mergers. But after the upgrade, LIGO should be able to detect gravitational waves from neutron star binaries, and we know they exist. The most exciting result would be to find something we don’t expect. I can’t say what that might be, because then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

Student question #2 from Shiri (Teresa) Liu, a Caltech physics sophomore: “In one of your TV series, you proved that time travel from the future to the past is impossible by holding a party for time travelers from the future. In your experiment, you planned to hold a party for the time travelers at noon on a specific day. You printed many copies of the invitations and counted on some of them to survive for thousands of years, so that time travelers living in the future will read the letter and use a time machine to come back to your party. However, nobody showed up at noon that day, so you concluded that time travel from the future to the past is impossible. Here is a paradox that I have encountered by changing your party plans: Suppose that time travel from the future to the past is, in fact, possible, and suppose that you have made a firm decision, before the party starts, to print and preserve the invitations forever. Suppose, you hold your party and time travelers do show up; but soon after your party you suddenly change your mind and destroy all the letters. What will happen? Will the time travelers who showed up at your party suddenly disappear into the future when you destroy the letters? If so, haven’t you just changed the future in the past? And, by the way, I’m just curious; do you still have all the invitation letters?

Hawking: “Even if I destroyed all the invitations, the television program is on YouTube, so time travelers from the future, would know about the party. Of course, they would also know that nobody came. Maybe that’s why they didn’t turn up.”

Student question #3, from Sirio Belli, a first-year grad student at Caltech in astrophysics: “The great Russian physicist Lev Landau, in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, ranked physicists on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 5 according to their productivity. He assigned the best score of 0 to Newton, 0.5 to Einstein, 1 to Paul Dirac and 2 to himself. What do you think would be your place on this scale? Many journalists have called you ‘the new Einstein,’ but I would like to know your opinion about the importance of your contributions to physics.”

Hawking: “Landau was good, but not that good. People who rank themselves are losers.”

A good time was had by all, and by all I mean the 1,100 people inside Beckman Auditorium, the additional 400 people in Remo Hall watching a video feed, and hundreds more on the lawn outside Beckman watching and listening on big screens and speakers. It is both rare and refreshing to see a scientist so popular that people were lined up to nab the handful of seats set aside for the general public as early as noon that day. Such is the nature of celebrity, even science celebrity.

In reverse order I give you my Top 10 Science Books of 2010:

10Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Oreskes and Conway tell an important story about the misuse of science to mislead the public on matters ranging from the risks of smoking to the reality of global warming. The people the authors accuse are themselves scientists—mostly physicists, former cold warriors who now serve a conservative agenda, and vested interests like the tobacco industry. And they name names, documenting their involvement in such issues as acid rain, the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the banning of DDT. These scientists aimed to sow seeds of public doubt on matters of settled science by casting aspersions on the science and the scientists who produce it. Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at U.C. San Diego and science writer Conway also emphasize how journalists and Internet bloggers uncritically repeat these charges.

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