Being wrong


 


I've been thinking about Thomas Gold . Austrian born, Cambridge-educated astrophysicist. A brilliant guy, an original thinker--and wrong about a whole bunch of stuff.
He coined the term 'magnetosphere' for Earth's magnetic field. He posited neutron stars as an explanation for pulsars--an unpopular idea until it became universally accepted.
But he also (along with Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi) espoused the steady-state theory of the universe. And he later argued that petroleum was not made from fossil biomass, but was generated geologically, circulating up from the mantle. (One corollary of this argument was that there was a whole lot more oil than most geologists said there was.)
It's not clear that Gold is wrong about this last: he did manage to pump oil in Sweden out of a 6km deep hole drilled in granite, where no oil is supposed to be; he asserted that bacteria would be living at a far greater depth than everybody else thought, and that's been borne out; and conventional geological models still don't explain the presence of helium in petroleum satisfactorily, as far as I've read. But there are big holes in his theory as well, and most geologists think he's wrong.

But here's the point: they don't think Thomas Gold was insane, or senile, or suddenly stupid. just wrong. Intelligently, responsibly wrong

Science has good ways to be wrong--which, I think, is why the rest of society tends to misunderstand science. Science writers get a little breathless when revealing that "Einstein was wrong!" about quantum mechanics, or the cosmological constant (which, it turns out, he might be actually right about). It's written as a great shocking thing: he was so smart, how could he be wrong? Well, the two are not in any way, shape, or form, the same thing.
Indeed, in French, they formulate it: Il a raison and Il a tort. Literally, 'he has reason' and 'he has wrong," which we still hear Shakespeare saying. (German, peculiarly enough, splits the difference: Er hat Recht, but Er ist falsch.) Thomas Gold was both wrong and right, and that sounds like a paradox, but having both wrong and right sounds like an everyday state of affairs. Reading Goethe's theory of colors is a stimulating experience, and shows a brilliant, not to say great, mind at work--but it's a great steaming heap of wrong, and it's all his.

Things of course get messier when we move into realms where it becomes harder to test--psychology, economics, or political theory. Paradoxically (and I mean it this time), where it's easier to stay wrong, it's al the harder to be wrong. Am I being too clever? No, I'm not simply saying that where correctness is more difficult to prove, it's easier to deny your incorrectness--that would be sophistry, yes. But what I'm saying is that, without clinical or experimental results to tack against, it's gets harder and harder to steer a course of genuine speculation. And unfortunately that has less to do with the nature of the field of study than with the social framework of the Eminent People.
Perhaps Academia's greatest virtue as a social grouping is the fact that its security and insularity (Ivory Tower off the port bow, cap'n!) allows for freewheeling speculation and unabashed wrongness. Some of the finest and most invigorating moments of my time therein were the port-and-cigars evenings spent with first-class minds tossing fancies like spitballs across the drawing room. But as things become more public and more is at stake, all that good stuff gets stored below.

That's I think, why the most stimulating stuff in current public discourse comes from physicists--or other disciplines with secure structures. Why is it that Freeman Dyson contributes so much, while Arthur Schlesinger (may he rest in peace) did not? Some of it, of course, has to do with the horribly debased nature of discourse in this country (don't get me started--I just spent ten minutes stating at the screen as visions of Jonah Goldbergs danced in my head)--but beyond that, there's the question of where is the play in the minds of the brilliant folks dealing with the humanistic side of things? Why do the physicists (and folks like Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec) have all the fun?
Some of it may be that someone can take a flight of economic fancy and use it as an excuse to starve people to death--or a psychological Gedankenexperiment and justify beating a child bloody with a car aerial--but more of it is that the position of a public intellectual is pretty precarious in modern society, and unless you are clueless , you tend to be sobersidedly cautious. Otherwise--whisht!--off to the dustbin of history with ye!
We do have a corner of our society where being wrong is elevated, literally, to an art form, and that's science fiction. There, fortunately, it's not just physicists and engineers who have all the fun--and its protective coloration (That Star Trek Stuff!) allows for full-court play, where Bob Heinlein and Octavia Butler and Orson Scott Card and Kim Stanley Robinson and Jerry Pournelle and Brian Aldiss can continue to go on being wrong, with great steaming piles of Wrong and Right dotting the landscape for anybody to come and sniff, and stuff in their pockets if they so desire.
It's a shame it's not more of a part of general public life, even in the parts of the current world where you aren't imprisoned for your opinions. I think that some of it is correctible: teaching kids that some questions stay questions, and that running around looking for for easter eggs--or fairies--is not a bad thing even if you don't find any--as long as you pay attention to what you do find. If we making kids not afraid of being wrong, just of staying wrong, might bring is a society that is less afraid to play with ideas.

But of course, I could be...

Posted: Thursday - March 01, 2007 at 02:45 PM        

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