What happened to the 'mad scientist'?
Interview in latest New Science-ist mag with Britain's cabinet minister in charge of science and technology. John Denham is clearly an engaging fellow, but his answers show a peculiar innocence about what people actually need and want. (Of course he's a self-admitted Communist, but that sort of goes without saying if he's allowed to be a major player in the British or US govt.)

A couple of the Q and As:

Q: How important is science and technology?

A: It's critically important. Without the insights of science we won't be able to tackle major problems like climate change.

Since the criminal fraud of climate change was forced on us by "the insights of science", this is raw chutzpah. It's like a wife-beater saying "You need to stay with me, because you need my health insurance to pay for repairing your bones after I break them."

Q: Many scientists are concerned that the UK is moving away from basic research toward applied research.

A: As the person in charge of science within govt, I'm a vigorous defender of the value of fundamental research. I think though that we need to ... create the right environment and culture around our universities, so that knowledge with a practical application isn't left unexploited as purely a matter of intellectual interest.

That's a good answer and a good goal. The problem is that peer review and tenure have pushed theorists into ever more specialized and abstruse areas; they have steered away from reality at every turn, so that they are completely separated from any view of the real world. "Knowledge with a practical application" is still generated in industrial research facilities and engineering schools; this knowledge, even if abstract, goes sooner or later to develop products and methods. It would be good to advertise this, but there's no point in advertising the wild abstractions of the pure theorists, because they are in fact "purely a matter of intellectual interest".... and not even interesting to most scientists in the same discipline, let alone to smart laymen. The "best" theories are understandable and interesting only to a dozen colleagues.

Q: You used C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures" as a theme for a speech ... Nowhere is the scientific ignorance that Snow described more apparent than among your fellow MPs and civil servants.

A: [I'm trying to improve this,] but one of the obstacles is that sometimes people think science will give you one choice, that it will say "this is the answer to your problem." Of course, science almost never does that. It can inform your decision but it will rarely try to tell you there's only one opinion. If we could just get that understanding, people would be more relaxed about going for scientific opinion.

So many bad assumptions, so little time. (1) Global warming again. Modern science does in fact tell us there's only one answer, and the answer is plainly false. (2) People would really enjoy getting one answer, if the answer is demonstrably true and demonstrably helpful. They're not afraid of single answers as such. (3) In the areas where science does give more than one answer, the answers are so confused and rapidly changing that people have quite properly stopped listening. This week cholesterol causes heart attacks, next week cholesterol cures heart attacks.

= = = = =

The second question led me to think of one especially egregious and expensive bit of pure research: High-energy particle physics. Atom-splitting, in plain language. The CERN facility in Switzerland is setting up an experiment that stands a real chance of destroying the entire universe, according to its own theorists.

Sounds a lot like the Mad Scientist of earlier literature and comic books, doesn't it? Stroking his waxed mustache and rubbing his hands gleefully: "Har har har! I have you in my clutches now! If you do not continue to support my research, I shall pull this switch and destroy the universe!" Except that these mad scientists are so deeply immersed in banal evil that they don't even give us the choice. They are content to leave the choice to the random coin-flip of a quantum spin.

This is not pure science; it's pure psychosis. Hitler's scientists cheerfully killed Jews in the course of experimentation, but they were experimenting to help Aryans live a better life. They were sacrificing some humans to aid others... vicious but not crazy. Today's particle physicists are happy to sacrifice the entire universe to aid nothing at all.

We need to bring back the literary figure of the Mad Scientist.
  ¶ 7:08 PM