Russell's Blog

There is a group that is putting together a presidential debate specifically focused on science. I think the idea is that it would come after the primaries, so it would be among nominated candidates. How cool would this be?

Moderator : Senator, on the issue of dark matter, you have...

Clinton : Read my lips: No. New. Particles.

Moderator : I see. Mr. Huckabee, what is your position on dark matter? Do you agree with the Senator's assertion that it is baryonic in nature?

Huckabee : No, no I do not. If it were baryonic, it would interact strongly with light, and we would be able to see it. Then it wouldn't be dark matter, would it? No, I believe that we are facing something new and terrible; an abomination to those of us who actually obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle. That is why I have a four-point-plan for eliminating the scourge of dark matter from the universe.

Clinton : This is exactly the sort of misplaced priorities that I've been talking about. How can we be talking about non-baryonic dark matter when we don't even know the properties of the Higgs? What if there is no Higgs boson, and the whole supersymmetric model goes out the window? What if the Higgs turns out to have a mass in the range of only a few TeV, and these non-baryonic particles aren't heavy enough to explain the non-observable mass in the universe? Or what if the Higgs is hundreds of TeV, and the supersymmetric particles are too rare? We don't have the answers to these questions. This whole business of non-baryonic dark matter is really putting the cart before the horse.

Furthermore, I really must object to my opponent's fermion-centric position. While it is indeed true that Americans are mostly made out of fermions, we would not be the same country without the patriotism and hard work of bosons. Who would mediate the electroweak force if it weren't for the photon? Who would bind together our nucleons without the meson? My opponent is, at this very moment, harboring gluons in every proton and neutron in his body.

Seriously, though, whoever wins the nominations, I would just love see this sort of debate.

This month's Physics Today has a fascinating article by Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy about the fate of science in Islam. Dr. Hoodbhoy is a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. He covers a lot of ground, from the golden age of science in the Muslim world (the 9th-13th centuries), it's collapse with the rise of Asharite fundamentalism, to science in modern Muslim states.

Americans should look carefully at what happened in Baghdad in the 13th century. The Muslim world was resplendent civilization of intellectual tolerance, cultural pluralism, and political liberalism. This period came to an abrupt and bloody end with the overthrow of Mu'tazilah thinkers and leaders and their replacement with the stricter, inflexible, literalist Asharite thinkers. The bloody death of rationalist religious inquiry splashed across every aspect of civilization, dooming science, politics and culture to a prolonged dark age.

Americans would be well served by the study of this sad patch of history. It has many important parallels with our own inflexible, literalist religious doctrines.

Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or "butterfly-collecting" activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked.

Hoodbhoy's argument here is broadly applicable. It is just as true for Islam as for Christianity, or Judaism, or any other religion. It is even true for non-religious doctrines. The study of physics was able to flourish under Stalin, but evolutionary biology and genetics, which tended generate ideas embarrassing to the cause of Communism, were repressed and grossly distorted.

Could this happen in 21st century America? You bet.