Odds are stacked when science tries to debate pseudoscience

ONE POINT OF VIEW I vividly remember the first time I was hijacked on the radio. I had agreed to participate in a debate for a Florida radio program that specialized in alien visits and U.F.O. sightings. My better judgment suggested that I should be wary. But I thought if I kept my focus purely on the physics challenges involved in space travel, I might be able to persuade some listeners to be skeptical of the claims that aliens were regularly visiting, abducting and experimenting with our fellow earthlings. I should have known better, After 45 minutes defending myself against the claim that I was close-minded, when I argued that science did in fact impose constraints on what is possible, and politely responding to demands that I must first scrupulously review all the specific claims of alien sightings before I could possibly have the temerity to make general statements about plausibility or implausibility, I felt that any uninformed listeners who might have been waiting to be swayed probably found themselves merely confused at the end of the show. In a debate that confronts the results of science with pseudoscience, from alien abductions and crop circles on one hand to the health benefits of weak magnetic fields or young earth creationism on the other, the odds are stacked against science. Part of the problem is uniquely American. We in the United States are constantly regaled by stories about the limitless possibilities open to those with know-how and a spirit of enterprise. Combine that with a public that perceives the limits of science as targets that are constantly being overcome, and the suggestion that anything is absolutely impossible seems like an affront. Indeed, modern technology has made the seemingly impossible almost ordinary. How often have I heard the cry from an audience, "Yeah, but 300 years ago people would have said it would be impossible to fly!" Although true, the problem with that assertion is that 300 years ago people did not know enough about the laws of physics to make the assertion, so the claim would have been improper. Had they made a simpler claim like "Three hundred years from now, if you drop this cannonball off the Tower of Pisa, it will fall down," they would have been right. Science Unfair: All Ideas Are Not Created Equal Although it is probably true that there is far more that we do not know about nature than we do know, we do know something! We know that balls, when dropped, fall down. We do know that the earth is round and not flat. We do know how electromagnetism works, and we do know that the earth is billions of years old, not thousands. We may not know how spacecraft of the future will be propelled, whether matter-antimatter drives will be built or even if time travel is possible. But we do know, absolutely, how much on-board fuel will be needed to speed up a substantial spacecraft to near the speed of light-an enormous amount, probably enough to power all of human civilization at the present time for perhaps a decade. That means that aliens who want to come here from a distant star will probably have to have some better reason than merely performing secret kinky experiments on the patients of a Harvard psychiatrist. As difficult as debating ultimate limits of the possible may be, there is another debate that is even harder to win. But it is a debate that may be even more important. It is a debate on the "fairness" of science. The reason for the difficulty is simple. Science is not fair. All ideas are not treated equally. Only those that have satisfied the test of experiment or can be tested by experiment have any currency. …