According to Richard Milton in his book ‘Alternative Science,
Challenging the Myths of the Scientific Establishment’, we are living in a
time of rising academic intolerance in which important new discoveries in
physics, medicine, and biology are being ridiculed and rejected for reasons
that are not scientific. Something precious and irreplaceable is under attack.
Our academic liberty – our freedom of thought – is being threatened by an
establishment that chooses to turn aside new knowledge unless it comes from
their own scientific circles.
Some academics appoint themselves vigilantes
to guard the gates of science against troublemakers with new ideas. Yet
science has a two thousand year record of success not because it has been
guarded by an Inquisition, but because it is self-regulating. It has succeeded
because bad science is driven out by good; an ounce of open-minded
experiment is worth any amount of authoritative opinion by self-styled
scientific rationalists. The scientific fundamentalism of which these are
disturbing signs is found today not merely in remote provincial pockets of
conservatism but at the very top of the mainstream management of science
on both sides of the Atlantic. Human progress has been powered by the
paradigm-shattering inventions of many brilliant iconoclasts, yet just as the
scientific community dismissed Edison’s lamp, Roentgen’s X-rays, and even
the Wrights’ airplane, today’s “Paradigm Police†do a better job of
preserving an outdated mode of thought than of nurturing invention and
discovery. One way of explaining this odd reluctance to come to terms with
the new, even when there is plenty of concrete evidence available, is to
appeal to the natural human tendency not to believe things that sound
impossible unless we see them with our own eyes – a healthy skepticism.
But there is a good deal more to this phenomenon than a healthy skepticism.
It is a refusal even to open our eyes to examine the evidence that is plainly in
view. And it is a phenomenon that occurs so regularly in the history of
science and technology as to be almost an integral part of the process. It
seems that there are some individuals, including very distinguished
scientists, who are willing to risk the censure and ridicule of their colleagues
by stepping over that mark. This book is about those scientists. But, more
importantly, it is about the curious social and intellectual forces that seek to
prohibit such research; those areas of scientific research that are taboo
subjects; about subjects whose discussion is forbidden under pain of ridicule
and ostracism. Often those who cry taboo do so from the best of motives: a
desire to ensure that our hard-won scientific enlightenment is not corrupted
by the credulous acceptance of crank ideas and that the community does not
slide back into what Sir Karl Popper graphically called the ‘tyranny of
opinion’. Yet in setting out to guard the frontiers of knowledge, some
scientific purists are adopting a brand of skepticism that is indistinguishable
from the tyranny they seek to resist. These modern skeptics are sometimes
the most unreflecting of individuals yet their devotion to the cause of science
impels them to appoint themselves guardians of spirit of truth. And this
raises the important question of just how we can tell a real crank from a real
innovator – a Faraday from a false prophet. Merely to dismiss a carefully
prepared body of evidence – however barmy it may appear – is to make the
same mistake as the crank. In many ways cold fusion is the perfect paradigm
of scientific taboo in action. The high priests of hot fusion were quick to
ostracize and ridicule those whom they saw as profaning the sacred wisdom.
And empirical fact counted for nothing in the face of their concerted
derision.