ISAAC ASIMOV said that the phrase most likely to herald a scientific discovery is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny…”. It is fitting that Michael Brooks chose that sentiment to kick off . Based on his hugely popular żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ article (19 March 2005, p 30), this entertaining and often provocative book examines such mysteries as dark matter and dark energy, the prospect of life on Mars, sex and death, free will and the placebo effect, among other head-scratchers.
If Asimov provided the epigram, philosopher Thomas Kuhn provided the central thesis: it is those niggling scientific anomalies, which seem to make no sense, that most often give rise to scientific revolutions, changing the way we think about the universe and our place in it.
“It is those niggling anomalies that give rise to revolutions”
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If you want to know where the next revolution will occur, look to the anomalies. offers 13 of them, though not everyone will agree with his choices. For instance, his inclusion of homeopathy initially elicited in me an inward groan of dismay, but Brooks deftly argues for its inclusion because of its relation to the placebo effect: people think it works, so they feel better. He strikes a careful balance between the obvious quackery and the few tattered shreds of credible science underlying homeopathic principles.
The book is at its best when Brooks throws himself into the action. He undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the assumption that he has free will, and subjects himself to electric shocks for a placebo-response test. Ironically, given his physics background, he is less actively engaged and less convincing when writing about anomalies that fall within his expertise.
Brooks’s treatment of the controversy surrounding is disappointing. He snagged an exclusive interview with Martin Fleischmann, who, with Stanley Pons, announced the “discovery” of cold fusion in 1989. Fleischmann tells Brooks that his biggest regret is that he “never told people I was only interested in understanding quantum electrodynamics”. I wanted to read more about this rarely covered aspect of cold fusion, and more about his conversation with Fleischmann, but Brooks doesn’t delve much further into either. Instead, he offers a tepid rehashing of the controversy, though he does a creditable job of separating the signal from the noise and bringing the original experimental anomaly back to the forefront. Low-temperature nuclear reactions, as cold fusion is now called, remain a mystery with inconclusive evidence and no satisfactory theoretical explanation… yet. It might be a strange form of fusion. It might be something else entirely. What it won’t be is “a clean, virtually inexhaustible form of energy”, as the University of Utah’s infamous 1989 press release claimed.
This elegantly written, meticulously researched and thought-provoking book provides a window into how science actually works, and is sure to spur intense debate. At times, Brooks lapses into the all-too-familiar theme of championing the underdogs: those persecuted souls whose claims are prematurely dismissed by the stodgy scientific establishment. And sometimes he seems exasperated with scientists who steadfastly refuse to “embrace the extraordinary until they rule out the ordinary” – even though doing so might mean spending a decade or more poring over data, as , one of the book’s heroes, has done in his investigation of the .
Brooks seems most impatient with , who uncovered what appeared to be the first evidence of life on Mars. His was one of four experiments aboard the Viking spacecraft in the mid-1970s; the results of the other three were too ambiguous to confirm the discovery. Levin, who still believes his experiment worked, remains cautious, even as Phoenix performs experiments that may vindicate him once and for all. “If not a scandal, this seems a shame,” Brooks chides. “This overwhelming caution, this softly-softly approach to looking for life beyond Earth, is postponing a glorious moment in the story of humanity.”
I say let those glorious moments wait until we have an indisputable, bona fide discovery. It should be a rigorous, difficult process to usher in new scientific paradigms. That maddening caution and painstaking sifting through data serve as a safeguard against bias and wishful thinking. Eventually, if an idea is sound, it will survive the personalities, politics and petty conflicts of the practitioners of science. Brooks acknowledges this: “True anomalies stand by themselves because they don’t go away.”
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense
Profile/Doubleday