In a manner fitting to its name, the topic of “Outsider Scientists” came out of nowhere this weekend to hold a central place in what I read, heard and discussed. Sally and I had a couple of string theorist friends over for dinner on Saturday, and Sally being the uber-hostess noted that the fist-bump issue of the New Yorker had an article about Lisi. Not just a little “talk of the town” gossip blurb, but a full blown “annals of science” depth piece. Not to dwell too much, but it’s a shame that a story that was picked up and bolstered by outlets that thrive on the weekly deluge that fades in a months time (New Scientist, Popular Science, Wired, even the Economist when it comes to tech) over a year ago was rehashed and given, in my humble opinion, a leg more than it deserved.
Just as I was moving on This American Life brought up the “quirky” Floridian author of E?mc^2. According to him it’s actually only E = mc. Now, it doesn’t take a PhD in string theory to dismiss this, but simple book keeping. Energy, by its very definition, has units of mass*velocity^2. That’s basically it.
The narrator of this piece kept saying “I didn’t really know enough to tell him he was wrong, so I thought it was best to be kind and supportive.” The only other time I was this angry at This American Life was the camp episode. The supposition that “I need to hear him out because I don’t understand this” is fine, but the addendum of “I need to hear him out and report his theories because I don’t understand this” is FUCKING RIDICULOUS. Yes, yes, they talked about the crackpot website, but the narrator made no attempt to understand anything before he wrote this story, and that’s just sloppy.
Finally, on Sunday All Things Considered, which should already say a lot, Wired’s Chris Anderson was waving his “End of Science” argument around. And I’m not gonna lie, he almost had me. Anderson is a gifted speaker and a smart guy. But regardless of Anderson’s persona, to say that having better experimental and data gathering techniques means that theory is dead is to miss the very point of the scientific process. This data, once passed through the many stomachs of this cow called Science, will lay the ground work for a hypothesis, which will lead to targeted experiments, which will lead to theory, which will be refuted through further experiments and if said theory holds up, then we pat it on the back and call it law. Because Craig Venter can analyze a barrel full of whatever you throw at him in an hour doesn’t indicate the end of theory, no, it indicates the beginning.
All of these stories make for sexy copy, and it’s always OK to think about and question the process. However, in each one of these cases the proponents, whether in a direct or obfuscated, rest on the tautological fallacy for their arguments: “it is because it is”. Lisi’s theory “works” because it cuts out everything and actually predicts nothing. The electrician from Florida says “It’s really hard to prove that e=mc^2 so it might as well be e=mc and if I say e=mc, e=mc”. Chris Andersen says “Data exists because data exists.”
Regardless of the aptitude of the sophist, circular logic should always be pointed out and dismissed out of hand. Not “understanding” arguments is no excuse to give air time to poorly constructed ones, whether it’s Fox News or NPR. And it’s not to say that outsiders to a field cannot bring anything to the party, but it is to say that circular reasoning, whether it’s a surfer, an electrician, or an editor du jour, brings nothing.
