Horgan, John. "Science Set Free From Truth," New York Times, 16 July 1996, p. A17.

Horgan, John. "Science Set Free From Truth," New York Times, 16 July 1996, p. A17.

last month at a conference in Buffalo called "Science in the Age of (Mis)information," scores of scientists railed against "anti-science," including the vile trend known as postmodernism.

Hearing the denunciations at this meeting, one might guess that distinguishing truth lovers from truth defiers is child's play. The forces of rationality sport shiny white jump suits, like the hero of "Toy Story," while the epistemological subversives skulk about in black T-shirts and berets. If only things were that simple. Like a mutant virus, postmodernism has infected not only philosophy and the social sciences but even such alleged bastions of truth and objectivity as physics and chemistry. Some of the most prominent scientists in the world traffic in hypotheses that are remarkably postmodern in character. I like to call this type of theorizing ironic science.

The concept of irony is central to that wellspring of postmodernism, literary criticism. According to such eminent critics as Northrop Frye, no text should be viewed as literally true. The Bible, "Finnegans Wake," even Mr. Frye's own essays are all ironic in the sense that they have multiple meanings, none of which are definitive. The job of the literary critic is thus not to pin down the true meaning of a text - an impossible task - but to invent new meanings ones that challenge received wisdom and provoke further dialogue.

Similarly, ironic science advances hypotheses that, while often profound and provocative, should not be considered literally true. My favorite example of ironic science is superstring theory, which for the last 15 years has represented the cutting edge of physics. Sometimes called a "theory of everything," it posits that matter and energy in the universe, and even space and time, stem from infinitesimal loops of urstuff writhing in a hyperspace of 10 (or more) dimensions.

The leading practitioner of superstring theory is Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Time magazine recently named Dr. Witten one of the 25 most influential Americans, and with good reason. Dr. Witten's papers on superstrings have made him far and away the most cited physicist in the world. In a now famous paper published last May in Social Text, a quarterly devoted to cultural studies, Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University,

proposed that superstring theory might help liberate science from "dependence on the concept of objective truth."

Professor Sokal later announced that the article had been a hoax intended to expose the hollowness of postmodernism. In fact, however, superstring theory is exactly the kind of science that subverts conventional notions of truth.

The tiny domain that superstrings supposedly inhabit is even less accessible than the quasars haunting he edge of the visible universe. For instance, a superstring is to a proton in size as a proton is to the solar system. To probe this realm directly would require a particle accelerator 1,000 light-years around. (The entire solar system is only one light-day around.) In other words, it is highly unlikely that we will ever know whether superstring theory is true; that's what makes it ironic.

Ironic science has flourished on the macro end of physics as well. Physicists like Sidney Coleman of Harvard and Andrei Linde of Stanford have speculated that our galaxy-emblazoned cosmos is merely one of an infinite number of universes, some perhaps with similar laws of physics and even similar inhabitants. A fascinating possibility - and one that will probably never be verified.

The phenomenon of human consciousness is a seed from which myriad ironic blooms have sprung. Every year more books and conferences are devoted to the question of how mere matter can possibly give rise to subjective thought. Is a bat capable of thought or an amoeba?

What about a computer?

Of course! thunders Marvin Minsky, the artificial-intelligence maven of M.l.T. No way! retorts Roger Penrose the British physicist and best-selling author.

The real answer is, Who knows? Science cannot gain access to the subjective realm. No human can be absolutely sure that any other human has an inner life. We all make this assumption because it is the reasonable thing to do. But reasonable people always can and will disagree on whether a machine or an amoeba thinks, because there is no way to settle the dispute empirically.

Most scientists vehemently reject the notion that they are engaged in anything smacking of postmodernism. But a few brave souls have made such an admission, albeit obliquely. One is the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for showing how certain chemical reactions "self-organize" into striking patterns.

Professor Prigogine's work is the inspiration for the trendy field of "chaos," which addresses phenomena so messy and complicated that they resist conventional scientific analysis. Pointing out that chaotic phenomena are by definition unpredictable, Professor Prigogine has declared that we have reached "the end of certitude." Science in the future will be increasingly probabilistic and speculative - in other words, ironic.

An even more radical view has been set forth by John Wheeler of Princeton, who coined the term black hole and is one of this century's most respected physicists. Professor Wheeler spent years pondering quantum mechanics, which portrays electrons as either waves or particles, depending on how the experiment is carried out. He concluded that reality is a "participatory" phenomenon, defined in some sense by the questions we put to it.

"I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination," Professor Wheeler once said.

Professor Wheeler's view evokes that of the late Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher whose 1962 book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," remains a seminal text of postmodernism.

Professor Kuhn contended at science reflects not the truth about nature but merely scientists' prevailing mind-set, which is always subject to change.

This claim simply does not withstand scrutiny. Science has established beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of atoms and elements, DNA and bacteria, stars and galaxies, gravity and electromagnetism, natural selection and the expansion the universe. These are all facts. They will be true a century or even a millennium from now.

Why, if scientists can achieve real truth, do they indulge in ironic science? Because conventional science, as far as it has come, has left many mysteries unresolved. Are quarks and electrons made of smaller particles, which are in turn made of still smaller particles, ad infinitum? Is our universe just one of many universes? Was the evolution of conscious, intelligent beings inevitable a fluke of nature?

Lurking behind all these questions the biggest question of all: Why is there something rather than nothing? Unfortunately, scientists have even less hope of solving this riddle than literary critics have of deciding, once and for all, what Keats's "Ode a Nightingale" really means.

I do not mean to imply that ironic science has no value. Far from it. At best, ironic science, like great literature or philosophy or, yes, literary criticism, induces wonder. By addressing unanswerable questions and imagining realms beyond the reach of true science, ironic science helps insure that we remain forever awe- struck before the mystery of the universe. But ironic science cannot give us the truth.

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John Horgan, a senior writer at Scientific American magazine, is the author of "The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age." On the Other Hand

Freeman Dyson, in an article in Scientific American quotes Bohr's comment on one of Pauli's ideas: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough."

(p. 80)

Science is not limited to the naive realists who, religiously, are committed to their "objective universe." That's an article of faith for true believers. Here's the way Nobelist Sheldon Glashow puts it:

We believe that the world is knowable, that there are simple rules governing the behavior of matter and the evolution of the universe. We affirm that there are eternal, objective, extrahistorical, socially neutral, external and universal truths and that the assemblage of these truths is what we call physical science. Natural laws can be discovered that are universal, invariable, inviolate, genderless and verifiable. They may be found by men or women or by mixed collaborations of any obscene proportions. Any intelligent alien anywhere would have come upon the same logical system as we have to explain the structure of protons and the nature of supernovas.

This statement I cannot prove, this statement I cannot justify. This is my faith.

One can take alternative poses with regard to science. One can "play" at science and enjoy, rather than feel threatened, by imagination and relativism. Here, for example, is an alternative to the faith of Glashow.

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\Conroy, Frank. "Mind Games," New York Times Magazine, 14 July 1996, p. 50.\

1950. STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL. GEOGRAPHY. ROOM 312. I SAT IN THE THIRD ROW, NEAR THE TALL windows through which the sunlight flowed, providing me the opportunity to make interesting shadow shapes with my fingers on the surface of my desk. Mr. Dediase had been explaining the Mercator projection (which I knew about) for some time,

drawing stuff on the board, talking about peeling grapefruit. Finally, Dediase pulled down an enormous map of the world; Its size and brilliant colors caught our attention.

"First the continents," Dediase said, "the great land masses exposed when the oceans receded in prehistoric times." He walked us through with his pointer, showed us ca the great rivers, the major mountain chains, the inland be seas, the polar icecaps. He did this quickly, and then suddenly stepped back.

"Take a look at the whole thing," he said. What does it suggest to you?"

We looked at the map. Silence. Incredibly, Dediase let it alone. I looked at the map. I saw a map.

"Oh, wow!" somebody said.

"Skorton. What do you see?" Dediase was smiling.

"They fit. Sort of. Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle."

"Very, very good, Skorton."

I felt a distinct thrill. "So you mean way back sometime it was all one piece? Parts broke off and floated away?" In my excitement, my eye kept catching what seemed like fits.

"That's what it looks like, Conroy."

"It's terrific," I said.

"Yeah," Dediase agreed. "But it didn't happen."

"What?" I was outraged. "What?"

"The field is geomorphology. Prevailing wisdom says it didn't happen. It shows how careful we must be. The obvious answers are often wrong, as in this case."

Hence, many years later, when plate tectonics became a paradigm, I felt a great deal of pleasure. The prevailing wisdom in geomorphology in 1950 had been dead wrong.

I've always loved wild theories. I collect them the way other people collect paintings, first editions or stamps. I have more than I can possibly mention, and though most of them are simple curiosities, some have more than a kernel of truth.

In 1955, for example, at Haverford College, Robert Oppenheimer stated that the existence of life elsewhere in the universe was a "virtual certainty." I was thrilled, but many others thought the great man a bit flaky. So imagine my delight now that scientists are seriously reconsidering that possibility.

"Worlds in Collision," by Immanuel Velikovsky, also caught my eye in the 50's. It described an earth that had been bombarded with meteorites large enough to cause catastrophic climactic changes. The cover was lurid, the paper was pulp and the contents presumably science fiction. (And almost all of it was.) But only a few years ago, the scientific community confirmed Velikovsky's idea. (The rest of his work has about as much scientific value as Nostradamus's.)

Some wild theories are simply a joy to play with, like the work of J.W. Dunne, a mildly crazed British polymath. Consider the often-observed sense that time goes faster as we get older -supposedly an illusion.

Dunne proposed forgetting Ockham's Razor - which says, in effect, if you have two answers that completely satisfy a mathematical problem, take the simpler and shorter one - at a certain point in the relativity equations. If the more complicated solution is applied, you get a model in which time is accelerating infinitely. In other words, time seems to be moving faster because it is moving faster. Einstein was apparently underwhelmed by this idea.

These days we have the work of the Harvard psychologist who believes that people who claim to have been abducted by aliens actually have been abducted by aliens. And let's not forget the hitherto scoffed-at idea that two or three glasses of wine a day is good for you. I suppose my love of these theories comes partly out of identification with the outsiders, rebels and autodidacts who (mostly) think them up, unafraid to run against the grain. Their outspokenness suggests that the advance of human knowledge is not as smooth as one might think. There have been bumps, interesting garden paths and cul-de-sacs that force us into a more active testing of our assumptions. But care must be taken about false science - astrology, numerology and various fraudulent systems encouraging us to stop thinking altogether. After all, it's fun to think. It's no

fun not to.

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Frank Conroy is the author of "Stop Time" and "Body and Soul."

References

\Dyson, Freeman. "Innovation in Physics," Scientific American (September, 1958), pp. 74-82.\

\Glashow, Sheldon. "We Believe That The World is Knowable," New York Times, 22 October 1989, p. E24.\