The Courage of Your Convictions

It is really easier to say nothing. You are under no obligation to say anything. If you must voice an opinion against some nonsense, it is enough to say that you disagree and leave it at that. Moreover, a postmodernist or someone similar will tell you that right and wrong are only cultural constructs. Of course that assertion itself is a cultural construct. And even a scientist will remind you that our ideas about truth have changed as new facts have been discovered and new theories developed to explain them. It was not always so. There was a time when a scientist would truly go to the ends of the Earth to prove a theory. 

Today, scientists are not alone in accepting a false theory of induction which asserts that we can only approach but never know the truth. 

From Susan M. Lea and John Robert Burke, Physics: the Nature of Things (Thomson Brooks/Cole; 1997). 

“Physics is an experimental science that prides itself in getting close to reality through laboratory testing of theory. … How can we be certain that the experimental process of dissecting nature into component part is ultimately correct? We can’t! Belief in experimental science depends on one’s worldview.” -- page 12.

 

“Consistency with experiment and usefulness in understanding nature are the properties of a good physical theory. The word truth is conspicuously absent. Aristotle… Kepler and Galileo… Newtonian physics, [were] thought absolutely true for 250 years. In the twentieth century, we have learned that Newtonian physics is not exact but stands as an excellent approximation. Absolute truth is elusive. We continue to seek greater depth in our understanding, greater elegance in our theories, and greater precision in our experiments. Whether truth can be achieved in some approximate sense by this process is unanswerable. We believe in physics because we know we can organize our knowledge and employ it to describe the behavior of nature with greater accuracy using only a small number of fundamental ideas.” -- page 14

Not all scientists are timid.

“As a scientist, Sagan speculated freely, sometimes wildly, and outraged his more cautious colleagues. ... He anticipated some interesting scientific discoveries, although sometimes (and oddly) for the wrong reasons. ... The price of fame is a big head, and Sagan’s grew mighty big; eyewitness testimony to this effect abounds.... Most scientists, by contrast, are rarely so self-assured. To them, Truth is a like a blob of mercury—it’s hard to pin down. Sagan’s air of omniscience made him seem sometimes slightly inhuman, more like Mr. Spock than Mr. Wizard.” ) Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davison, John Wiley & Sons, 1999, pages xiii- xiv passim.

 

When the American Astronomical Society sought to present Margaret Burbidge with the Annie Jump Cannon Award in May 1971, she rejected their offer.  

[quote] In a letter to AAS secretary Laurence Frederick, Burbidge wrote, “I believe that it is high time that discrimination in favor of, as well as against women in professional life be removed, and a prize restricted to women is in this category.” Underlying that official statement was the suspicion that the Cannon Award had kept women from receiving other recognition. In conclusion, Burbidge wrote, “It would be interesting to know, however, how often our names have been excluded from consideration for professorships, directorships . . . because we are women.” 

At that time, AAS offered two other awards—the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, which honored an astronomer’s long and distinguished career, and the Helen B. Warner Prize, for astronomers no more than 35 years old. No woman had received the Russell. Burbidge was the only woman to have won the Warner Prize, in 1959, and she had shared it with her husband Geoffrey for their work on stellar nucleosynthesis.

From Physics Today 27 Feb 2018 in People & History: The award rejection that shook astronomy by Roberta Humphreys at https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.4.20180227a/full/

Interviewed by Joe Rogan (YouTube here) Neil deGrasse Tyson said that while the dictionary definition of “atheist” applies to him, the functional definition does not. Functionally, he said, an atheist is someone who feels compelled to argue with religious people. He also said that he often uses the word “God” in the vernacular sense, as when he wished an astronaut friend, Godspeed, echoing “Godspeed, John Glenn.” 

 

On the other hand, Richard Dawkins advocates for militant atheism. Granting that religious people can be good, he refuses to relinquish the epistemological high ground. Not only does God not exist, as good as many people seem to be, only religion specifically allows and encourages them to be bad. Arguing against that proposition some people point to the atheists of communist governments—the USSR, Cambodia, and China--who carried out atrocities against people holding religious beliefs. However, despite claims to “scientific socialism” political Marxism-Leninism is really another religion: it has books of sole truth, a priesthood, and intense internal battles over dogma, none of which can be empirically verified. Whatever failings that scientists have as individuals—to err is human—they do not bomb each other’s classrooms and cafes. 

It is not a lack of standards or a want of values. Right and wrong exist and we can know them. Only physical force is forbidden. As the US Supreme Court ruled on the legality of polygamy in Utah (Reynolds vs. the United States 18 US 145; 1879):You are free to believe whatever you want; you are not free to do whatever you want. Personally, I believe that SCOTUS was in error on the wider issue. As long as no one was coerced, they were all free to do whatever they wanted. The fundamental truth remains, however: The strength and resiliency of an open society is a consequence of the interactions—even acrimonious debate—among people advancing their own ideas.

 

It is infamously known in astronomy that Cecilia Payne changed her doctoral dissertation to agree with the (widely accepted) theory of her advisor Harlow Shapley and astronomers generally that the elements are distributed in the stars very much as they are on and within the Earth. Payne found that hydrogen is a million times more abundant in the stars. Similarly, 80 years later, confronted with doubts from the highest authorities, Bruce Campbell and Gordon Walker retracted their claim to have found the first evidence of an exoplanet. Nonetheless, it remains foundational to the scientific method that you have to know when you were wrong. How you know is as much a matter of introspection as it is of epistemology. 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Karl Popper and His Enemies 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

The Scientific Method 

The Scientific Method (Revisited)