Weird Science

What could be more miraculous than the physicist’s universe, which exploded out of an infinitesimal speck of nothing, condensed into matter, stars and planets--and science fiction writers? What could be more awe-inspiring than the adventures of a little rover named Sojourner Truth on the fourth rock from the sun, our sister planet Mars? What could be more intriguing than the emergence of thought from that three-pound mess of 15 billion nerve cells we call the brain--each cell constructed from atomic building blocks cooked up in the furnace of exploding stars?

Yet increasingly, it seems, people prefer pseudoscience to the real thing. To be sure, most uses of pseudoscience--such as TV’s “The X-Files,’ “Star Trek’ or psychic hotlines--are purely for entertainment, but that’s not always how they are received. More and more, people are heeding the teachings of shamans and psychics, believing in reports of alien contact and scientific-conspiracy theories rather than listening to the lessons of the natural world. More and more, people are distrusting the world of science and turning to pseudoscience as a substitute.

It’s not even clear that most people know the difference. On the face of it, the belief that the configuration of the planets can influence one’s love life is no more bizarre than the belief in subatomic particles, and psychic powers are no stranger than 10-dimensional space. Scientists are dreamers, too; they need to use imagination and take wild leaps of faith. The worlds of science and science fiction are not normally inimical. Most science fiction writers love science and use it to inform their work. Many scientists enjoy science fiction and are hard-core fans of shows like “Star Trek’ and “The X-Files.’ But they worry that some might interpret the fantasy as science. The difference, of course, is that science is a process that ultimately requires proof.

We thought that these issues would offer fertile ground for discussion, so we invited a diverse group of scientists and science fiction writers to grapple with some of them.

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The cast of characters:

K. C. Cole, moderator, science writer for the Los Angeles Times. Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of “Why People Believe Weird Things’ (W H Freeman and Co.).

Carol Tavris, social psychologist, author of “The Mismeasure of Woman’ (Touchstone).

Frank Spotnitz, writer for “The X-Files.’

Andrea Ghez, UCLA astrophysicist.

Tom McDonough, astrophysicist, coordinator of the Search for Extraterrestrial Life at the Planetary Society in Pasadena and a science fiction writer.

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C. Cole: In Carl Sagan’s book “Demon Haunted World,’ he writes about being picked up by a taxicab driver who says, “Oh, you’re the great Dr. Sagan. I’m interested in science, so could you please tell me about . . . .’ and this guy starts asking about the Shroud of Turin and Atlantis.

When I read this, I didn’t quite believe it. Then I was down in San Diego doing a story on some physicists, and I get a taxi driver who likes science. He’s very well read, and we’re talking about very sophisticated stuff. Then, suddenly, he’s off about black holes that suck memory out of people, and I’m thinking, “How did we get here?’ Because in my world there’s science and there’s science fiction, and I love them both, but they’re different. But that seems not to always be the case these days.

Michael Shermer: This is the question all skeptics are asking. How did this happen? People can’t seem to discriminate between good science and bad. We get letters routinely from people saying Einstein was wrong, Newton was wrong, (Stephen) Hawking’s wrong.

Cole: I got one yesterday about how there’s no such thing as gravity. Multiple pages, single-spaced.

Carol Tavris: You know, not all people who write single-spaced typed letters are cranks, but all cranks write single-spaced typed letters. Yet it’s not a problem of intelligence or creativity, because these are intelligent creative minds coming up with clever connections. They just don’t understand how science works.

Cole: People have said shows like “The X-Files’ are bad because they play into that.

Andrea Ghez: There might be a linkage. I think it’s more an issue of science versus religion, a way to resolve apparently contradictory belief systems.

Frank Spotnitz: I don’t know how new any of this is. I mean from time immemorial, people took the Bible literally. Now, more people today view the Bible as a parable. That’s a rise in rationalism.

Shermer: Although now we have “The Bible Code’ on the bestsellers list, claiming that the Bible has secret messages in letter sequencing. Faith apparently is not good enough, so they have computers finding proof that the Bible is divinely inspired.

Tavris: I think TV shows and movies get a lot of blame for promoting certain ideas. But it’s people’s love of the ideas that make a show successful. Throughout history, people have loved eerie tales, ghost stories, fantasy--science fiction in one form or another. So the question is not how does “The X-Files’ create scientific illiteracy in our culture but where does scientific illiteracy come from? What is the appeal of the kinds of explanations that now seem to be so prevalent?

This century is one of . . . acceleration is too slow a word. In my own lifetime, the idea of what a person’s life would be--you would marry at a certain age, have kids at a certain age, retire at a certain age--is completely out the window. There are technological changes, massive disruptions in the rules and predictable elements of people’s lives. And at the same time there’s been a massive decline in the traditional beliefs--political beliefs and religious beliefs. The big explanatory systems are gone. Communism is gone. Capitalism is gone.

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Spotnitz: Michael Crichton wrote this book “Travels’; in his last chapter, he talks about all these strange experiences he had. His point was don’t dismiss all of these pseudoscientific beliefs out of hand. Investigate them. See why they are persistently popular. Why do people continue to believe them.

It’s amazing what science has achieved. But you have to have the ability to say, look how many things we don’t understand. I think that’s the appeal of belief in the fantastic.

Ghez: There’s a lot of fear of the unknown. Humans don’t want to admit that we don’t have all the answers. I think that we naturally tend to create our own belief system, whether or not it’s based in fantasy or reality. Something.

Shermer: You know, the studies by Malinowski on the Trobriand islanders over fishing rituals found that the further out they went from the island for fishing, the more elaborate the rituals got. Fishing on the island itself--no rituals at all. Local surf fishing, one or two rituals; deep-sea fishing, lots of rituals. So the greater the unknown, the more the superstitious rituals were elaborated on.

Cole: That’s interesting. But on the opposite side, I think a lot of people rightly get confused when we tell them these extraordinary things with a straight face. I could mention almost anything, but let’s just take 11-dimensional vibrating strings (a theory explaining the existence and workings of the universe).

Shermer: That’s about as sci-fi as you can get.

Cole: Exactly. And why should we take this seriously as opposed to, say, astrology? It’s complicated to explain why you should believe in symmetry and the laws of nature and how they fit together. But I don’t think a lot of scientists really take the time to say, this is why this is true or not.

Ghez: Scientists aren’t encouraged to make science accessible to the public. In fact, the community of scientists tends to ostracize those that do.

Tavris: Those who popularize.

Spotnitz: We’ve been attacked in some quarters because the scientist’s explanations are always defeated by the paranormal. But at least there are explanations that will probably lead young audiences to be interested in science. Just as I think “Star Trek’ in the 1960s encouraged all kinds of people to explore the space program.

Shermer: In what percentage of shows is [Agent Dana] Scully (“The X-Files’) right? Anybody actually count?

Spotnitz: In the final explanation, [Agent Fox] Mulder is almost invariably right. Actually, Penn and Teller came in a couple years ago and wanted to do a show where science won. But a show like that wouldn’t be satisfying dramatically.

Shermer: How do you know that? I mean, are there surveys showing 99% of Americans want the mystery?

Spotnitz: You don’t write based on demographics. You write as a dramatist and a storyteller. And to have the sense of wonder defeated at the end is not what you want.

Tavris: But detective stories are all about a satisfying and rational solution.

Cole: That’s right. “Columbo.’

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Spotnitz: I’m not arguing for not coming up with a solution to the mystery. The whole basis of “The X-Files’ is two characters, one of science and one of faith. And that is the dialectic that drives every episode. We always use science to ground things in reality. As a matter of fact, the stories are really told from Scully’s point of view, a scientist’s point of view. She is the educated viewer who’s watching the show and saying, “No way, ridiculous, I don’t buy it,’ and Mulder is forced to defend the paranormal. Scully is trying to make sense of what doesn’t seem to make sense by applying the lens of science.

Ghez: Right. That’s why I think the show doesn’t really stray so far from science, because it’s teaching the audience to approach things from this structure of scientific method.

Shermer: But you have an opportunity here . . . .

Tavris: Science is a method; it’s not a belief system. That’s the difference.

Shermer: That’s true.

Spotnitz: You want to be skeptical enough to get rid of the ideas that won’t stand up to scrutiny, but you don’t want to be closed to wild ideas that might be true. That’s one thing forefront science and science fiction have in common: a lot of it is “what if?’ You really have to be able to get out there and ask the wild questions.

Ghez: You want to keep that. You want to keep that openness. You don’t want to become a curmudgeon.

Tavris: You don’t want rationalism to become a religion.

Tom McDonough: That sense of wonder is central to most science fiction. The majority of science fiction has to be set in the future precisely because it offers more possibilities. Your program is set in the present, and you don’t have that freedom. So you touch on things that are anecdotal, things that people talk about--ESP and zombies and whatever.

It bothers a scientist because we spend a lot of our time trying to debunk the very things that “The X-Files’ presents. I have ambivalent feelings about the show. I think it’s extremely healthy to think about all possibilities, however bizarre, so long as you do so in a skeptical way. But there’s a certain percentage of the population that is immune to reality. These are the people who believe that Mr. Ed was a real talking horse, people who wrote fan letters to Mr. Ed.

Spotnitz: That’s true.

McDonough: One of our definitions of of insanity is the ability to sacrifice reality, and I think a certain percentage of the audience has this difficulty. It’s made worse by things like supermarket tabloids that present as reality these bizarre things--aided by computer graphics. Now it’s easy to produce photographic evidence of Clinton talking with an alien. People see this in a supermarket, and the more gullible think, “Wow, this must be true. They’ve got a picture of it.’

Cole: How does your science and your science fiction live together? Do they inform each other at all?

McDonough: Oh yes. Many of the best science fiction writers, even if they’re not scientists, have a good understanding of science. You try to extrapolate what might be possible. It doesn’t conflict with known science. In a few cases you might say, “Suppose something about known science turns out to be wrong?’ As long as you understand what you’re doing, that is accepted by the more critical science fiction fans.

Shermer: You’ve proposed an idea about why the stories of “The X-Files’ mustn’t be rational, but that’s a testable hypothesis. You can actually run the experiment. So let’s have a show where Scully turns out to be right, and see if the ratings go up or down.

Spotnitz: I’m not saying we won’t do a show like that. But the idea of the show is that there are things out there that we don’t know. It isn’t that Scully is proven wrong so much as it is that, about halfway through, science abandons her. She keeps trying to make sense of it in terms of science. And she can’t.

Cole: I never thought I would find myself arguing this point of view, but a lot of scientists on the edge, like string theorists or mathematicians who deal with new kinds of logic, very often don’t have any guidelines. A lot of it has to do with intuition and what’s beautiful . . . they say “you know, I kinda smell it.’ Granted, they have to go back and make it work mathematically, but still . . . .

Ghez: You have to allow yourself to get out of the confines of the party line. Science can be very trendy. Scientists are actually after more than the truth; they’re after their own belief system. And they can get stuck. A lot of the new work comes from people who are new to the field, who don’t have the same preconceptions.

Tavris: I saw a bumper sticker that said imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination is, of course, extremely important, but it only comes to the knowledgeable, to the prepared mind.

Spotnitz: Knowledge is the tools and imagination is the spirit.

Shermer: There are two types of errors in thinking. Type 1 errors: believing something that is true is false. Type 2 errors: believing something false is true.

Spotnitz: But the answer is often “I don’t know.’

Tavris: Maybe what we’re talking about here is that people don’t want to hear “we don’t know.’

Cole: That’s what Frank said earlier.

Tavris: At this conference I attended, a woman stood up in the audience and said, “I come to listen to you people talk about science, and I find I am really outraged. Why aren’t you angry about the bomb?’ An incredibly naive question, because of course we’re angry about the bomb, yet one I think that is very characteristic of how many people feel. They don’t see the advances that scientific knowledge really has given them. They take for granted the technology, the medicine, the fact that there’s no polio--whatever. They look at science and think it’s given us too many cars and pollution and the bomb. If you don’t understand how angry people are at science, you won’t understand why they are so drawn to mystical and supernatural explanations.

Ghez: It also falls along the lines of mistrust. People are afraid. They don’t trust government anymore. And they don’t trust scientists anymore. So science fiction fits right into that.

Shermer: Exactly. Who are you gonna trust?

Ghez: Science is a process of understanding. Science asks “how?’ but people want to know “why?’ Why are we here? As an astronomer, I feel more and more that there is no why.

Tavris: That’s not a best-selling philosophy.

Shermer: The big question is why the universe bothers to exist at all? Science can’t answer that question.

Ghez: If you get into this field looking for support, well, what I know as an astronomer says we’re all going to be wiped out. So if I need comfort, I need something bigger than astronomy to pacify me. Which is why a lot of astronomers are very religious.

Shermer: Oh, that bothers me to no end. They slip in a last line in there--”and now we will see the face of God.’ Even Stephen Hawking. Why do they put that in there?

Cole: Why does that bother you?

Shermer: It bothers me when it’s a book on science. God is not a conclusion drawn from the argument. It’s just sort of a line thrown in there for dramatic purposes. My model of science and religion is that they’re separate spheres. I don’t think the creationists and militant atheists are right, that either religion or science is gonna win. Science is not gonna replace religion. They’re two separate things.

Tavris: Now see, this whole debate is comparable to the battle in psychology between the psychoanalytical and the empirical research. Psychoanalysis has been pretty much torn apart by empirical research, and yet it has won the language war and the belief war. The language of psychoanalysis is embedded in our culture. Repression and regression and denial. People are drawn to psychoanalytic explanations for the same reason they’re drawn to ESP. It’s a total belief system. Yet to me, the research on memory and the brain and cognitive science is dazzling. Far more fascinating and useful than metaphors.

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McDonough: As a scientist, you realize that the more you want to believe something, the more you have to be cautious about it. The public, I think, has never learned this. I am a ufologist. I would love to believe that we’re being visited by aliens. It would be just fabulous. But that means I have to look with a jaundiced eye when someone presents alleged evidence of this. I’ve read a lot of books and met people who’ve supposedly seen UFOs and talked to a few who believed they’ve been in touch with aliens. And none of the evidence is very convincing. Most scientists will say the same thing.

At the same time, there are a lot of reasons to think that we’re not alone in the universe. There are many, many different pieces of evidence--the history of life on earth, the recent discovery of planets--that suggest that life probably exists elsewhere. And it’s reasonable to suspect that some of those planets may well have civilizations more advanced than we are. But we keep looking for astronomical proof that these exist. We don’t find it. And we think we’re going to have to look for many years before we’re successful.

Spotnitz: It’s like the search for verification of the existence of God. In the season finale of “The X-Files,’ we used archival footage of a NASA conference in which Carl Sagan and other scientists talked about what it would mean if we made contact with extraterrestrial life. It would change everything. The episode really was about that. At one point, Mulder says, “I think I’ve got proof of extraterrestrial life,’ and Scully says, “If you already believe, why do you want proof?’

Shermer: That was a great line.

Tavris: And did I hear that at the end of next season, rather than accept evidence that he’s been wrong all along, Mulder commits suicide? He wants to believe so much that he cannot live without his belief.

Spotnitz: You’ll have to wait for the movie.

Tavris: But that is absolutely true--when faith meets disconfirming evidence, it’s the evidence that’s thrown out, not the faith.

Cole: Right. Like all those illusions, you know, where even when you know the room isn’t crooked or the lines are different lengths. Doesn’t matter.

Shermer: I still claim that this idea that the public doesn’t want to know is a folk-psych assumption. I think about Stephen Hawking’s book, which had a permanent place on the New York Times bestseller list. Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.’ These are examples of beautiful science. The wonder, the mystery, is there but there are solutions, and the public loved it.

Cole: Right. “Mr. Wizard’ was a very popular show on Nickelodeon.

Tavris: You know, what we have is a sort of “ooh phenomenon’ people love. People love to be dazzled by mystery--crop circles or somebody’s “psychic ability.’ When people hear stories of what a psychic supposedly knew, they always say “Ooh, isn’t that amazing he knew that you lost a son named Kevin, how could it be?’ Now, if you then say, “Here’s how it works. Here’s how you are telling him everything he’s he’s been telling you. Here’s how crop circles are done.’ Then people say, “Ooh isn’t that interesting.’

Cole: Right.

Ghez: I think part of the problem is that the scientific explanation, the answer, isn’t as accessible as the public needs. It’s like the difference between me telling someone I am a physicist or an astronomer. If I say I am a physicist, forget it; conversation dies. Astronomer, well . . . .

Shermer: What’s your sign?

Ghez: Right. It is fascinating to read about psychics or aliens. There’s a physical quality about it that science doesn’t have. I mean, science isn’t a person, it’s a method for progressing our knowledge. I’m willing to say there might be things like that that are true, but I have a method I am comfortable with to rule out other things.

Spotnitz: I’m not a believer in psychics either, I’m just playing the devil’s advocate because this is the argument that I think Michael Crichton makes--that a lot of these things are dismissed, and yet they persist. Psychics have been around forever.

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Ghez: People want to know the future, that’s all. They want to know the future, and they want to know what happens after death.

Spotnitz: That’s why people are angry at the scientific world. George Steiner wrote in “In Bluebeard’s Castle’ that it’s really about the failure of rationalism and enlightenment. We saw science as a steady march to explaining what was going to happen. And then along came the 20th century, and it was very disillusioning to a lot of people. Because reason and science don’t really solve the problem of human nature. The 20th century has had more and greater bloodshed than any century known to man.

Tavris: With the exception of the 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman wrote in “The Distant Mirror.’

Spotnitz: Uh, yeah.

Tavris: In which two-thirds of the world’s population died just because of famine, plague and war. But you’re absolutely right. This woman in the audience that I was talking about before absolutely thinks that this is the worst century of humanity. And yet, genocide is not new to this century. The technology to make it happen on a large scale is, but genocide certainly is not. Neither are famine, plague and torture and vulgarities of all kinds.

Spotnitz: We thought science and rationality was going to keep us from being like previous centuries. But science failed to civilize.

Cole: Maybe it’s about getting older; you become like Clinton--move to the center where it’s safe. I do think it’s easier to separate science and religion. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the spheres overlap. So is it possible you guys will someday answer why there is something instead of nothing in the universe? What was there before the big bang? These used to be theological questions.

Shermer: People don’t have a framework to think about it. So we come up with some constructs that allow us to think about those problems. In fact, that’s a lot of what Hawking talks about. He came to speak at Caltech. And he rolled down the aisle in his little chair to a standing ovation, and he gave this synthesized speech filled with jokes and stuff. And then the Q&A; began, and it was like, Dr. Hawking, is there a God? Is there determinism or free will? As if he has the answers to these questions. Like he’s a disembodied brain.

Tavris: He’s been popularized just like Einstein’s been popularized. He’s an icon.

Shermer: He said, “I do not answer God questions.’

Spotnitz: I’ll tell you what, as a lay person, I think has done the greatest damage to science: these studies on things like coffee. Or red meat. Back and forth and back and forth and every couple weeks it’s in the newspaper. And people finally just say forget it.

Tavris: This brings us back to the media. Because we all know that the media depends on news. So reporters find whatever studies appear in the latest journal, then report it as news. But no scientist doing the study is gonna say this is a definitive study of . . . .

Cole: Oh, but they do now.

Shermer: They call a press conference.

Tavris: I guess that’s true, because research is now so dependent on grants. The money’s not coming from government anymore so . . . .

Ghez: Unfortunately, the media tends to pick up on people desperate for attention. That’s where the boundaries are really difficult. Because the scientists want to provide the story, and yet we don’t have all the answers. I want to stay out of the media.

Shermer: Why?

Ghez: Because they want to know what’s “new.’ And, really, nothing is “new.’ My work is part of a history. And there’s a big desire to put science fiction in press releases. I work on how stars form, and I conducted a study about the potential for forming planets. There was a press release, and I’m reading it before it goes out, and suddenly we’re into little green men, and I said: That’s not going out. No chance.

Tavris: Why is it always little green men? Are there little green women? I always worried about that. How do they reproduce?

Ghez: There’s something we haven’t talked about which I think is important, especially for “The X-Files.’ And that is the paranoia we’re living through now. “The X-Files’ feeds on the fact that the public loves to be paranoid. And science has become big science; it’s viewed as part of the government, so scientists become part of the many conspiracy theories that are out there. That’s the problem.

Cole: That’s a good point.

Ghez: It’s akin to what you were talking about--finding hidden codes in the Bible. The world has become so large and complex that none of us can hope to comprehend all of it. What everyone is searching for is the magic key. If you just had this, you’d be able to make sense of everything.

Shermer: But this is actually one of the most dangerous myths: that science changes whimsically from one point of view to another. Most of what Newton said about the universe is still true. We now know some stuff he didn’t [know], and Einstein added more, so we’re getting closer to the ideal. As if we’re actually building a sculpture.

Spotnitz: I think the problem is that some people espouse scientific views as if they were proven fact. And it may be very good theory. It may be upheld for centuries--until someone comes forward and says, “We’ve been telling you this for 60 years, that this is correct, and we’ve now determined beyond the shadow of a doubt that it’s completely wrong, and here is the truth.’ People say, “Well, wait a minute now. . . .’

Ghez: I’m having trouble with the language you’re using, because theory is not truth. Theory is the idea that I’ll explain the observations to the limit of the knowledge that we have.

McDonough: It’s important to understand the distinction between science and scientists. Lay scientists, and often the greatest scientists, become obsessed with a particular idea. The idea is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Science is carefully devised to circumvent the irrational quirks of our minds to test these ideas. This is why you have physicists in India and China and the United States who can agree on the mass of electrons and the orbital period of Mars and things like this, regardless of their religious beliefs, their political beliefs.

Tavris: But I think that Frank has said something very important about the public perception of science. I think people often confuse science with the way science is used. I mean the atom bomb is a good example of this. You can’t be angry at science for the bomb. That is, it was a discovery. It was our political determination to make it a weapon.

Shermer: Look at the response to cloning. The moral is, we have not been paying enough attention to the findings of science. They’re coming too fast and furious. They’re superseding our ability to cope with as a society. I mean, how do you make decisions about moral things like abortion and euthanasia and the right to die if you can’t even define what is life and death yet.

Spotnitz: You know, when I go on the Net to see reactions to the show--the implications of extraterrestrial life, religion, faith--really exciting topics, I think, and I would say maybe 1% of the traffic even touched on this. They’re talking about “Did he touch her there?’ or “What was that look she gave him?’ All this hard work, and it’s all about what Scully was wearing.