Our chief consultant writes:
Some weeks ago I mentioned paradoxers, those people from outside a certain science who come up with some amazing or important result that, sadly, is not accepted by those inside–mostly because it’s not true. I promised to describe the outstanding characteristics of this fascinating species; here are two.
While attending to his regular workout in the Five Colors S&T exercise room, our astronomer was reminded of his High School geometry class. (We’ll explain the connection later; it has nothing to do with the angles at which his various muscles were applying force.) Everyone was required to take geometry (and pass it), and most were required to do the same with algebra. Yet it’s a truism that very few people actually use those subjects later on, and most forget them immediately. Why, then, do we bother with teaching and learning them? There are several possible answers, to which we’ll add one of our own.
Our chief consultant writes:
We come to the hardest problem to set a layman: suppose there are two (or more) experts, that is, people who disagree strongly about some scientific or technical question, each of which has some claim to expertise. Call this “dueling PhDs.” You, as a layman, are called upon to decide between them. What do you do?
We assume that the matter is advanced or esoteric enough that there’s no question of you actually checking the math yourself. Also, that it’s not a matter of current research, where the answer really isn’t known. (That excludes, for instance, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose disagreeing about the Nature of Space and Time.)
You could try to evaluate the credentials of either side, working out whose PhD is stronger; or take of vote of scientists working on the matter; or, perhaps, decide on the basis of motivation, asking who is funded by whom. Slightly more useful is analyzing the rhetoric, on the assumption that someone with a poor scientific case is more likely to try to cover it with noise. All of these techniques leave us uneasy, and though we have some suggestions on how to use them we prefer a harder, more time-consuming method as a more reliable way of getting at something like the truth.
Our chief consultant writes: an occupational hazard of working in a Physics or Astronomy Department, or at an Observatory, is the occasional receipt of an unsolicited paper from someone outside these sciences. One of these typically presents a new theory, more or less sweeping in its results, that corrects (perceived) errors now being made by scientists.
Physicists and astronomers generally spend little time on them. It is highly unlikely that someone with a minimal or mistaken grasp of the sciences (as these invariably display) will stumble upon something useful that many very capable scientists have missed. It also requires a lot of time and concentration to get through an often torturous piece of writing. (It is a good exercise for teachers, however, in distinguishing poor presentation from genuine error. Sometimes they’re passed on to graduate students to hone their thinking.) In the nineteenth century the authors of this kind of thing were squaring the circle and disproving Newton. Augustus de Morgan made a study of them, calling them “paradoxers” (using the word “paradox” in a different sense than we do today), and Five Colors S&T has adopted this term. (It’s worthwhile dipping into de Morgan’s A Budget of Paradoxes if you can find a copy. The writing is dense, but often entertaining.)