Skip to main content

Free Radicals – Michael Brooks ***

This is one of those books that is very well done – but it’s difficult to like the outcome. Michael Brooks sets out to show that real scientists are not at all like the hyper-rational, logical, conformist Mr Spock caricatures we know and love. This is fine, as long as he doesn’t also demolish scientific heroes along the way – we all need heroes.
Whether it’s using drugs to stimulate ideas, or being selective results, it seems many a scientist has been prepared to stray from the straight and narrow in order to get to their desired ends. We see how dog eat dog the battle to publish can be, but also how a kind of ‘acceptable fraud’ is all too common – not the outright making up of results, but rather going all out to pursue an idea, possibly a spark of genius, even if it means temporarily ignoring an experimental result or interpreting the data in a slightly selective fashion.
Parts of the book feel a bit forced. The suggestion that many (or even any) great scientific ideas were the result of being on LSD or other drugs seems a little unlikely. Apart from anything else there is reasonable evidence that effective creative thinking is suppressed by drug use – users may well think they are being creative while high, but in reality aren’t. The capability to come up with new directions and see things in different ways seem to be better served by going for a walk or sleeping on a problem, rather than tripping – it’s difficult not to get the sense that Brooks is just out to shock the reader here.
There is also rather too much emphasis put on the tedious postmodernist views of Paul Feyerabend and his ilk. I thought that Alan Sokal’s brilliant hoax had put paid to all that rubbish, but Brooks was prepared to drag it into the argument. However there is no doubt that scientists’ tendency to take risks (whether with themselves and other people or with their theories), to support a theory far outside what is suggested by experiment and to be harsh to opposing theories are real and often hidden behind the ‘rational people of science’ facade. Brooks makes clear that sometimes a scientist will be so convinced with a theory that they keep on ignoring the evidence for years… and they are eventually proved right. How often this happens compared with occasions when they don’t get it right he doesn’t say.
Perhaps the most important message is the need for mavericks in science, not just conformists. All too often modern academic science is far too rigidly bound to make big progress. If we are to make real breakthroughs again, perhaps there needs to be more opportunity to go out on a limb. At the same time, and this is something Brooks doesn’t really pick up on, we need a lot more education of the public (and of journalists and politicians) in the realities of science – an understanding that it is very rarely about certainty, and is all about probabilities – and that it is much easier to disprove something than to prove it. The public expects science to be black and white, where it is really shades of grey. We just need education to understand that this doesn’t discredit it. They are by far the best shades of grey available. But we shouldn’t expect certainty.
In the end the advice I would have given to Michael Brooks if asked before he wrote the book would be ‘Tread lightly for you tread on my dreams.’ There is no doubt that this is an interesting subject, and it’s important that we understand that scientists are human. But you don’t improve matters by simply pushing them off a pedestal. They still have the best view around.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more