Scientists are only human, and all humans are vulnerable to failings. I have been following with great interest such excursions from the norm for most of my life.
Scientific fraud is perhaps the most infamous example. Such is the pressure to get published that many results are rushed to print before (or without) the necessary diligence. Many examples have been reported in the pages of The Skeptic (Australian Skeptics) and Skeptical Inquirer (Basterfield et al. 2020).
But fraud is not the subject of this article. Here I will add a few cases in addition to those discussed in the “The Nobel Disease,” the cover article in the May/June 2020 Skeptical Inquirer. That article chronicled Nobel laureates who embraced and clung to one or more decidedly “weird” idea with considerable conviction.
I will deal here with cases in which a scientist has veered a little off the beaten track but is still using the basic tools of science, where he or she develops a theory many would regard as weird and doggedly pursue it, often still using evidence and analysis.
The Nobel Prizes are arguably the highest recognition that a scientist can earn, and yet there are many Nobel laureates who have, later in life, turned to “screwball science.” Why is that? Perhaps with their tenure assured and nothing to lose, they can finally pursue some far-out ideas they have been sitting on for decades. Or perhaps it takes that kind of left-field mentality to win a Nobel in the first place.
The cases discussed here focus on areas that have interested me—fertile fields, including the laws of physics and reality and consciousness. I have presented on several of these cases in my series of lectures grouped under Physics and the Big Questions.
Max Planck
The contributions made by Max Planck (1858–1947) to physics included the nature of the photon and the description of particles in terms of quantum mechanics. He worked with Einstein on relativity and the classical versus the quantum. He received the Nobel Prize in 1918.
Quantum mechanics holds that everything is represented by wave functions that have abstract and nonlocalized properties until a measurement is made that collapses them to a particular result.
It is odd to hear this from a scientist who was well aware that the universe had been around for billions of years before there was any life to provide a mind.
Some interpret this as there being no underlying reality until a conscious mind decides to take a measurement. This perhaps led Planck in 1944 to say: “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of the existence of a conscious and intelligent Spirit. This Spirit is the matrix of all matter.”
Sir John Eccles
A leading Australian neuroscientist, Sir John Eccles (1903–1997) explored the structure of the brain and the nature of the synapse, the junction between two long neurons. Eccles studied the stretch reflex in the human leg and believed that the signaling across the synapse was electric, as it is within the neuron. But most of his colleagues turned to the chemical (neurotransmitter) theory. Eccles designed experiments that finally showed it was chemical, thus falsifying his own theory, in the best Popperian sense. So far so good.
For this research, Eccles was awarded one-third of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963 for “fundamental contributions to the ionic mechanisms of synaptic transmission in the brain.”
Having thus nicely capped his academic career, Eccles turned to a field that had obviously held his fascination all along—the science or perhaps the philosophy of the brain and consciousness. He proposed first World 1, the physical world we all know, which includes the brain. World 2 is consciousness and all mental processes. These two perhaps describe Descartes’s dualism. Then Eccles adds World 3: objective knowledge, which includes scientific theories.
His Wikipedia page shows excerpts from his 1973 book Understanding the Brain, and they make fascinating reading. But in the 1990s, his theories got weirder. As Wikipedia puts it: “Eccles proposed that each of the 40 million dendrons in a brain is linked with a mental unit, or ‘psychon,’ representing a unitary conscious experience. In willed actions and thought, psychons act on dendrons and, for a moment, increase the probability of the firing of selected neurons through quantum tunneling effect in synaptic exocytosis, while in perception the reverse process takes place.”
In my understanding of standard (materialist) physics, the psychon would have to be a new elementary particle to carry information into and out of the physical world. Materialists would complain this has several problems:
• There is no suggestion of it in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
• There is no trace of it in particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider.
• All particles carry energy, which would be found missing (or in excess) in our material universe.
Was Eccles addressing a nonexistent problem, or was he exploring a real gap in science, which might point to new discoveries?
Sir Roger Penrose
Even as a student, Sir Roger Penrose (b. 1931) was fascinated by impossible geometrical objects. He inspired artist Maurice Escher to create geometrical illusions, such as Waterfall.
His contributions to physics included applying new mathematical techniques, such as tensors, to Einstein’s general relativity. This yielded descriptions of a collapsing star and how it could form a black hole. This he taught to Stephen Hawking. Together (in the 1960s) he and Hawking made much progress, including how the reverse process could spawn a universe out of a singularity, better known as the “big bang.”
But it wasn’t until 2020, when Penrose was eighty-nine, that the Nobel committee awarded him one third of the Prize, with the motivation “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”
It is not clear why they waited fifty-five years; the Nobel is supposed to provide an active scientist with greater influence. Perhaps his other works cast doubts.
Meanwhile, Penrose’s imagination was not idle. One branch of his work became more esoteric. His book Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (1994) promoted his theory that microtubules (tiny structural rods) within neurons support quantum superpositions. When the wave functions collapse, this provides consciousness, which is nonalgorithmic and transcends the limits of computability.
Scientists and Rossi’s Cold Fusion
Apart from these Nobel laureates, there is a small group of reputable scientists worthy of mention who have added their imprimatur to one of the latest manifestation of fringe—very fringe—science, Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat cold fusion (LENR, or low energy nuclear reactions). Some of these have associations with the Nobel awards and skeptical organizations.
In 2012, Rossi claimed cold fusion technology, attracting an estimated $30 million from investors. In The Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 2019), I exposed this as a likely trick, in which the earth wire was retasked to smuggle in extra power past the metering.
But before the exposé, no less than seventeen reputable scientists who witnessed demonstrations of Rossi’s E-Cat gave positive endorsements. Nobel laureate Brian Josephson (see the “Nobel Disease” article), when asked whether it was possible that Rossi was just fooling people, replied: “Various people think that this is all a scam, but … he allows people to investigate it; they can decide what to measure, how to measure it, they can also look inside. [Rossi has shown] … clear evidence … in regard to the amount of energy it produces.”
Among them were three senior NASA scientists who reported back to NASA that it worked. Dennis M. Bushnell wrote, “This is capable of, by itself, completely changing geo-economics, geo-politics, and solving climate and energy.”
Two Swedish nuclear physicists who should have known better were Hano Essén and Sven Kullander. Essén is a Swedish theoretical physicist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He has been a president of the Swedish Skeptics Society, sister of Australian Skeptics Inc (ASI) and of the Center for Inquiry/Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Essén had read Rossi’s reports and commented favorably. Sven Kullander (d. 2014) was an experienced nuclear physicist and published some ideas of his own on cold fusion. He was chairman of the Energy Committee of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, which is involved in awarding Nobel Prizes.
As professors of nuclear physics, these two were invited by Rossi to view an E-Cat demonstration on March 29, 2011. Given the backgrounds of both Rossi and his claims, one wonders why they became involved at all.
They observed carefully and critically and provided a detailed report (Kullander and Essén 2011). They could see no hidden pipes or wires that could explain the ongoing energy production. This was widely published, along with media statements including: “My belief [was] probably … strengthened considerably when I saw and measured how it all works, that there is an energy release far beyond what one might expect.”
To properly evaluate the measurements and investigate the theory, they set up an informal reference group at a meeting in Sweden on July 4, 2011, which included other scientific authorities from Uppsala University in Sweden and a professor of physics from Osaka University in Japan.
This authoritative endorsement soon had the blogosphere buzzing with expectations of solving the world’s energy problems. Rossi started offering franchises for licensing around the world. Investors were queuing at Rossi’s doorstep.
To date, Rossi continues to promote his LENR technology without coming any closer to proof that it works … but with much critical analysis indicating it doesn’t.
Perhaps distinguished scientists need to seek the advice I was given by skeptical magicians: scientists are the easiest to fool, because nature does not set out to mislead; and you can be fooled by something hiding in plain sight.
References
Basterfield, Candice, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Shawna M. Bowes, et al. 2020. The Nobel disease: When intelligence fails to protect against irrationality. Skeptical Inquirer 44(3). Available online at /2020/05/the-nobel-disease-when-intelligence-fails-to-protect-against-irrationality/.
Kullander, Sven, and Hanno Essén. 2011. Experimental test of a mini-Rossi device at the Leonardocorp, Bologna 29 March 2011. Sourced from Researchgate, publication 265060454.
A Reply to Bridgstock: A Note Added in Proof
A third article on “The Nobel Disease” appeared in The Skeptic (Australia) in March 2021, titled “Not So Sick.” Martin Bridgstock, a long-time skeptical investigator and activist as well as a scientist and academic, challenged the conclusions of Basterfield et al. in their original article and in my follow-up article as well. In particular, as I understand it, Bridgstock points out that the scientists mentioned constitute only 3 percent of the total Nobel winners in science. He also suggests that some of those listed do not fit the definition of clinging to “weird ideas with considerable conviction.” And third, he says more research and analysis would be needed to reach a conclusion.
My own opinion is that the Nobel prizes in science are intended to acknowledge significant discoveries resulting from rigorous scientific research. Thus, we hold the winners in special esteem and afford them possibly the highest regard, certainly above scientists in general. Their pronouncements relating to sciences (as opposed to political views) retain great interest, even later in life, regardless of statistics. So, when they propose hypotheses outside conventional science, many people take notice. Perhaps it points the way to further productive research, which will ultimately reveal whether the ideas are substantiated or not. Either way, their ideas are challenging and entertaining.