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The popular ideal of scientists is that they are committed to truth, unbiased by emotion, and scrupulously honest in the reporting of data. On top of that most would claim to be professionally unselfish and open to new ideas. The archtyptical scientist is someone who painstakingly collects objective data, tests every side of a question, and dispassionately assesses the results. And yet as cases such as polywater, infinite dilution, and cold fusion show errors in science do arise because of a loss of objectivity.
Irving Langmuir, a nobel prize winning chemist, identified what he called pathological science. This science generally studies effects which are at the limit of detectability, or have very low statistical significance. It is difficult to do the experiments reliably, because there may be no consistent relationship between the magnitude of the effect and the causative agent. But once the investigator is convinced that something new and important has been discovered the fact that all the parameters involved in its development are not under control is viewed as having little consequence.A second characteristic of pathological science is a readiness to disregard prevailing ideas and theories about which there is a consensus. By putting forth a new theory the investigator becomes still more deeply committed to the new discovery - because with both a remarkable experimental observation and a revolutionary theory major international prizes may be waiting over the horizon!
Chemistry appeals to me particularly because it deals with the concrete and relatively easy to measure things - atoms and assemblages called molecules, on which definitive experiments can usually be done. These are real things that we can see and play around with. They are like Lego blocks that we make things with. We can check whether there really is anything in the diluted water, and actually measure the structure and stability of the new form of water, and put a number on the extra energy we are getting out from the fusion experiments. But many chemists accept chemical evolution! Why? Not because of definitive experiments. Consensus is not a criterion for truth.
The nuclear physicist or the cosmologist has rather different problems to deal with - because nuclear particles are very small and elusive, we can only see their effects, not see them. And there is only one universe as far as we can tell, which came into existence once in a rather unique way. Thus the cosmologist and nuclear physicist can't use many of the experiments that I use as a chemist- checking what things look like, and how consistently phenomena reproduce themselves on other days.
It is part of the faith of science things that happen on Tuesday will also happen on Thursday - (with some exceptions on Monday morning and Friday afternoon!) But we can't check out the ' big bang' by repeating the experiment on a Tuesday morning, nor can we pull out our bag of quarks to count them one Thursday afternoon. This doesn't mean to say there wasn't a 'big bang' or there aren't a fixed number of quarks in the universe. It just means that it is tough to it check out. But we are getting better at collecting the data, which makes our inferences increasingly more plausible.
We can measure the size of the universe, and get increasingly consistent effects from the particles in the zoo which the nuclear physicist visits on a daily basis. So we habitually speak with confidence of entitities which are not directly observable. Watson and Crick never saw a gene - but the X-ray photograph suitably interpreted led to the helical structure of DNA. I talk about electrons in almost every lecture - but we have only seen tracks in bubble chambers, which indicate the presence of a particle with certain negative charge and mass about 10 -27 g.
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