Yes, We Have No Neutrons: An Eye-opening Tour through the Twists and Turns of Bad Science by A. K. Dewdney, Wiley, $22.95, ISBN 0 471 10806 5
EVER since those unusual noises started coming from Victor Frankenstein鈥檚 spare room, scientists behaving badly have been good for a laugh. But A. K. Dewdney, better known to long-term readers of Scientific American as a deviser of tricks and treats for home computers, isn鈥檛 laughing. Like a stern headmaster, he insists scientists who don鈥檛 stick to the rules bring the whole school into disrepute. Sadly, these rules soon get Dewdney himself into trouble. The problem lies in his definition of bad science. It happens, he says, 鈥渨hen someone strays in a fatal way from the scientific method鈥�. Unlike bad behaviour, which is still behaviour however bad it gets, bad science, it seems, ceases to be science at all.
How then can we continue to call it bad science? If we were really as strict as this, scientists would be immune to censure: as soon as they broke the rules they would no longer be bound by them. This is an unhappy start to a book aiming to debunk sloppy thinking.
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The problem stems from Dewdney鈥檚 adherence to a view of science close to that promoted by the philosopher Karl Popper. In Popperian thinking, a falsifiable hypothesis is induced from observations and survives until someone comes up with a further observation it does not predict.
While later thinkers such as Thomas Kuhn and observers of scientists such as Harry Collins or Bruno Latour have shown that this is a considerable simplification of what happens in practice, Dewdney鈥檚 concern seems to be to keep Popper pure in a world of sin.
Revealingly, he says that one of his motives for assembling this cautionary catalogue of backsliding boffins is that they make 鈥渢hose who would paint science as a purely social process with no meaningful truths behind it giggle with delight鈥�. Though they have never made so strong a claim, Dewdney, it appears, does not want to give people like Kuhn, Collins and the rest a micron for fear they take a millimetre.
Dewdney鈥檚 absolutist definition of science throws together a strange miscellany of miscreants in these eight case studies. None are deliberate fraudsters. Some have got caught up in a movement, like the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, that has blurred their judgment. Some, like Freud, whom Dewdney demolishes with lip-smacking relish, have started such movements and ensnared hundreds. And there are those, like Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons, whose cold-fusion circus gives the book its title, who have tried in vain to start something big.
Among the stories Dewdney investigates there are a few鈥攍ike the tangle of notions surrounding that elusive, illusory entity, IQ 鈥� that would get a clear thumbs-down from anyone with a grain of scientific decency. But others evoke a whiff of injustice. Neural networks, for instance, are in the dock not only because they have been hyped to high heaven (what hasn鈥檛?) but also because you could create a successful net without understanding how it worked: the bunch of numbers that captures its behaviour would in all probability be 鈥渁n opaque, unreadable table . . . valueless as a scientific resource鈥�.
In spite of his emphatic declaration that science is not technology, Dewdney seems here to pillory neural nets as bad science when most of those devising them are just trying to be good engineers. An unreadable table that a useful machine could read would still be well worth having.
But the book鈥檚 real interest lies in the way it refutes its own central thesis. If ever you wanted evidence for the social construction of science, here it is in abundance. Surely all self-aware scientists will experience a twinge of 鈥淭here but for the grace . . .鈥� when they read these stories.
Scientific thought and motives are never pure, but social checks and balances, Dewdney鈥檚 among them, eventually grind out a view that survives for a while. We need more of this, not less. If scientists could open up their world to ordinary human criticism and stop pretending they have an infallible route to the truth, bad scientists would come unstuck more quickly and more often.