Science

California writer and blogger¹ Catherine Seipp recalls the late Richard Feynman, the Cal-Tech Nobel-winning physicist. Unassuming, unconventional and irrepressible, Feynman's one of my heroes (Insta-wife and many others agree), even honored on a Postal Service stamp (image here). He's best known among laymen (like me) for the first volume of his self-deprecating autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and his bust-through-the-bureaucracy identification and dramatic demonstration of the cause of the Challenger shuttle explosion.

Feynman was famously dismissive of jargon-laden Olympians in lab-coats, complaining "ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience," curable by:

scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

Tying the physicist to present public policy, Seipp concludes "intelligent design" is un-falseable and thus unscientific under Feynman's philosophy. And it's true, as Philosophy prof Kelley Ross writes, Feynman belonged to the "if-you-can't-bite-it, it-ain't-there" school:

Philosophical questions never had the slightest appeal to him, nor religion. He was thus a purely scientistic scientist, ignoring or dismissing anything about life and the world that was not accessible to scientific method.

But that strategy seems outmoded, at least for those of us lacking Feynman's genius. Increasing complexity and ever-narrower specialization make falsification protracted for scientists (see, e.g., South Korean stem-cells) and unlikely for laymen (see, e.g., global warming). Partly, that's because politics permeates science to an unprecedented extent, with outcomes increasingly dictated by fund-source, with dissent stifled by circle-the-wagon peer review. Worse still, certainty's scorned -- hunted for sport by the Hollywood set -- the whole notion of objectivity's being supplanted by post-modern relativeness.

The infection's not just confined to colleges. Since 2001, news and the net are overcome by the once sober, now certain a global conspiracy (invent yours here) is keeping them, and their politics, down. Once upon a time, these screw-balls could be subdued by reason, Occam's Razor and real-world testing. Unfortunately, those defenses were drafted as deconstructive weapons in the war for social change--making Jabberwocky-grade nonsense plausible (write your own here) and torturing truth 'til it confesses to the communitarian concept de jour.

With cheers from the press-box, the "scientism" at the core of evolution, Einstein and the experimental method is being reconfigured to turn out trendy theories. Speculation's suddenly satisfactory--at least if supports retreat to the primitive internationalist/enviro/NGOs and pessimistic progressives "desperate to apologize for the success of Western capitalistic civilization." In short, science, leftism and media merged, expanding the market for each.

To the press, science is newsworthy only if it's anti-Bush--leftism trumps truth. Similarly, fewer supposedly factual academic and trade papers are either accurate or "accessible to scientific method." Were he to return and re-assess science (integrety or coverage) today , Feynman wouldn't recognize it at all.
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¹ And cancer patient, high on my "pray for" list.