Can scientists speak freely in public?

In a video entitled I can’t believe this really happened (which has already received over 14,000 comments on YouTube) Sabine tells us that in an earlier episode* she judged a physicist’s work to be ’100 per cent bullshit’. Let’s be honest, this isn’t polite. It’s not how we expect academic discourse to be presented. But this was not an academic forum, it was a YouTube video. The physicist requested Sabine take the video down: when she didn’t, he complained to various academics and, according to Sabine, as a result she is ‘no longer affiliated with the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy.’ Effectively she lost her academic position.

Sabine makes an entirely valid point on the nature of some aspects of theoretical physics: that it is pseudo-science and hasn’t followed the scientific method for decades. This is very much the argument made in her excellent book Lost in Math, where she argues persuasively that far too much theoretical physics is, instead, playing around with mathematics that has no link to the physical world from experiment or observations. While some theoretical physicists disagree, this isn’t a particularly controversial position. 

Sabine puts the reluctance to break out of the cycle of pointless research to group think. This is by no means a new viewpoint. In his 2000 book A Different Approach to Cosmology (with Burbidge and Narlikar), Fred Hoyle put forward a quasi-steady state alternative to the Big Bang. He illustrated the general attitude of cosmologists with a picture of a flock of geese, all following each other. It’s how cosmology, and some aspects of theoretical physics tends to be – following the accepted line and ignoring alternatives, not from green-ink using fringe pseudoscientists, but respected scientists. Hoyle may well have been wrong in his theory, but at least he was offering a challenge. In Kuhnian terms, we definitely need a paradigm shift here.

Interestingly, Sabine mentions how often we get purely speculative headlines in the press from these kind of fields. In my book on The Multiverse (23 October) I do a news search on ‘multiverse’, omit all those referring to Marvel movies and science fiction, and get a list of headlines, every one of which is arguably just as much bullshit as allegedly is this paper. It’s not that we shouldn’t talk about multiverses – it’s fine to play around with speculative ideas. It can be fun. But we shouldn’t treat it as the same type of science as the scientific work that gives us new vaccines or devices based on quantum physics. Here’s just a couple of those headlines:

• Aliens from a Parallel Universe May Be All Around Us – And We Don’t Even Know It, Study Suggests (Popular Mechanics) – By definition anything can be happening in a parallel universe we can’t detect, but what does it tell us?

• Could we travel to parallel universes? (Live Science) – No.

• Our reality seems compatible with a quantum multiverse (New Scientist) – It’s also compatible with invisible dragons. It doesn’t mean that either exists.

Should Sabine be so outspoken? Why not. Should she have been disaffiliated – certainly not. Should the scientist whose work she criticised have complained. No. I review a lot of books: just occasionally, an author will complain about a negative review. It’s not a good move for them or for the book. The same applies to responding badly to critiques of your pet scientific theories. Grow up, science community. And listen to the criticism, even if it could have been more polite. We need science to be accepted by the public who fund it – and that means being prepared to admit when you’ve got things wrong.

* Sabine identifies neither the physicist nor the specific video

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