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We’ve got two more myths on the chopping block this week. (The alliteration suits our barstool quite nicely too. Good luck with the title if you’re a few pints in!) For those just joining the myth-busting spree, I’ve been chipping away at common misconceptions afflicting pop-science these past few weeks. My purpose is to disabuse readers of the notion that science does not engage in story telling, myth making, and fraud. In fact, these activities are pervasive and often foundational to standard practices. Here’s a quotation from Horace Freeland Judson’s book The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science:
The grandees of the scientific establishment regularly proclaim that scientific fraud is vanishingly rare and that perpetrators are isolated individuals who act out of a twisted psychopathology. As a corollary, they insist that science is self-correcting. . . .The grandees make these claims as a matter of faith. They could not be so dogmatic if they had considered the evidence there is that might back up general conclusions, positive or negative, about the nature and incidence of scientific fraud. Their claims about science are unscientific.1
The Robert A. Millikan Myth
Now to our mutton. As Judson explains, establishing a constant, discreet charge for an electron was “a polemical masterstroke—and [Millikan] knew it—central to final establishment of the atomic theory.” Indeed this scientific finding won Millikan the Nobel Prize in physics in 1923.2 To make matters worse, in 1978 it came to light that Millikan was guilty of some book cooking, reporting data from only 58 drops of 140. Still worse, Millikan lied about his method repeatedly, reporting that his calculation arose from data on “all the drops experimented on during 60 consecutive days.”3
Were Millikan the sort of scientist we expect, he would have presented a different picture: that a statistically significant number (though not the majority) of his oil drops suggested tantalising numbers with a common denominator. This would have been an honest portrayal of his data, but not likely the sort of thing to earn him a Nobel. As Mansoor Niaz observes, “present-day undergraduate students do not consider the [Millikan oil drop] experiment either simple or beautiful but find it rather frustrating.”4
I have no intention of weighing in on the actual science here, only on the myth that sciences like the kind that gave us the precise charge of an electron are “exact” and “pure”—a sphere of human activity that transcends our fallibility and produces reliable facts. Though clearly there is a lot to learn about electron charge before holding forth on the subject, one is left to wonder—along with those frustrated students who replicate the Millikan experiment today—how reliable the conclusions derived from such a messy experiment truly are.
Michelson-Morley Experiment Myths
Once upon a time (1881) the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that James Clerk Maxwell’s hypothesis of a medium—called aether—giving rise to light, electricity and magnetism did not exist. This heroic conclusion overturned the pseudoscience of Aether Physics which had brought electrification and countless technologies—including the telegraph, the radio, the telephone and the lightbulb (along with many others to come)—into existence. The chief heroism was the rejection of a notion central to sense making: the idea that a medium is essential to any understanding of energy propagation.
But the Michelson-Morley experiment achieved no such nonsense. Professors of the History of Science Theodore Arabatzis and Kostas Gavroglu summarise the false conclusions generally attributed to the Michelson-Morley (M-M) experiment as follows:
(1) that the M-M experiment proved the constancy of the velocity of light, regardless of the velocity of its source; (2) that the M-M experiment refuted the ether hypothesis; (3) that special relativity was developed in the context of mechanics rather than electrodynamics; and (4) that special relativity was a generalization of Newtonian mechanics.5
Arabatzis and Gavroglu examine the Michelson-Morley experiment in terms of its handling in the textbook and educational framework. In other words their critique is aimed at how science is taught, and at how these methods of teaching lead to widely held scientific misconceptions about what has been proven and what has yet to be proven, but also about how scientific progress and insight come about. The linear narratives (the stories) told for pedagogical simplification establish misleading perceptions of science and scientific knowledge. As Thomas Kuhn and Arthur Koestler pointed out back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, linear scientific progress is a myth. The whole history of science is one that looks more like sleepwalking with all manner of baby steps followed by missteps and backsliding. Trusting that the latest science is the best science is unscientific.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
Judson, Horace Freeland. The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2004. pp. 26-7.
Ibid. pp. 72-3.
See Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science. Ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2020. Mansoor Niaz, p. 160.
See also Judson op. cit. pp. 74-75.
Compare blogger drorzel and his “saving” of Millikan: https://scienceblogs.com/principles/2014/05/15/millikan-einstein-and-planck-the-experiment-io9-forgot?fbclid=IwAR32QyMmuamd7MEeQddUKPCbmRvRna6m1ObWYZyyna4l3o6tVrdUfSbyAT8 (Accessed Oct 2023)
Monsoor Niaz. Newton’s Apple. Op. cit. p. 163.
Theodore Arabatzis and Kostas Gavroglu. Ibid. p. 154.
One of the things that struck me in this stimulating article was the reference to pedagogical simplification. In decades of teaching medieval English literature, language, and history, I was often torn between wanting to make a point effectively and worrying that students would clap onto an even more simplified version of it than the one I offered. In class, as in life, there is only so much time to refine and qualify. I am reminded of Victor Davis Hanson's observation, in "A War Like No Other," that Greeks did not measure time in our paradigm of centuries, which, we often think, have crises at the end or at the beginning, "the turn of the century," e.g., and all that the inflection point implies. The Greeks did not know they were "BC" or "BCE." But historians always date wars and deaths using those terms, which simplify and create connections--analogies?--that are misleading. Using the known to get to the unknown has its risks, reliable as it can be as a teaching strategy. BC/AD BCE/CE might not seem scientific, but in their own way these terms are part of that "behemoth" of "the sciences" mentioned below. Very helpful post and comment.
Well indeed, your article conveys the point well, which is: The Sciences involve many assumptions. Their primary assumption is that they're right, because they're right. If you dare to disagree, or question, then 'ad hominem' attacks from The Sciences are coming for you.
That's a simple fact.
For that reason, recent scientists who stumble through frauds, place themselves in a precarious position. Much that could be realized is not realized, because much conflicts with this or that 'established fact.'
Vocalizing this, as you do, helps open cracks in the seeming perfection in that behemoth know as The Sciences. For that reason, you work here is more important that you realize.