OPEN debate and freewheeling disagreement are science’s special sauce. But this sauce can sometimes get a little sticky. When the temperature rises, egos inflate, insults bubble over and sparks fly. The clash of ideas becomes the clash of the minds that hold them.
Think Newton against Leibniz on who invented calculus. Or “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley against “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, debating evolution. Or Tesla and Edison and the battle for supremacy between alternating and direct current (a battle that indirectly led to the ).
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Or, indeed, any number of instances of scientists behaving badly in the present day…
An asteroid killed the dinosaurs
Oh no it didn’t!
Thankfully, velociraptors and their ilk are now confined to museums and movie theatres, but some of the primal violence of their world seems to have spilled over into the lecture halls where scientists discuss their disappearance.
The “dino wars” began in 1980, when Nobel-prizewinning physicist Luis Alvarez and his collaborators, including his geologist son Walter, asteroid impact had precipitated a global mass extinction 66 million years ago.
They had been measuring levels of iridium, which is a rare element on Earth, thought to be brought here by impacting meteorites. What they found was a huge spike that dated to the time of the extinction in rocks near Gubbio, Italy. Proof positive, said Alvarez, who just two years later declared that the impact’s occurrence, and its causal role in the extinction, were ““.
Geologists work on slower timescales, and some were not impressed by a physicist muscling in on their territory. Things got decidedly nasty, and accusations of dirty tricks, wilful deceit and incompetence flew both ways. “I don’t like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they’re really not very good scientists,” Alvarez, by then dying of oesophageal cancer, . “They’re more like stamp collectors.”
That same year Princeton geologist Gerta Keller entered the debate. “It was one of the nastiest controversies from the get-go,” she says. As a relative unknown presenting results refuting the impact hypothesis to a conference of true believers, she found herself a target of the personal vitriol. “It was essentially an attack feast,” she says.
In 1990, the discovery of a 150-kilometre-wide impact crater off the coast of modern Mexico dating to around the right time seemed to clinch things for “the impact mafia”, as Keller calls them. But she persists in her sometimes lonely war. “I grew up in the Alps, I am a hardy mountain creature”, she says. The data just don’t fit, she insists. “I ask them why they always lie. All they have is a sexy story, and they know it.”
I have the proof
Oh no you don’t!
It’s as simple as ABC – except when that ABC is the ABC conjecture. Back in 2012, , Japan, claimed a proof of this problem, variously described by żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ as “a long-standing pure maths problem” and something that “explores the deep nature of numbers”.
In fact, we have regularly reported over the years on the increasingly fraught attempts by mathematicians to verify Mochizuki’s dense 500-page proof, without really explaining what it, or the conjecture, involves. That’s because we can’t. No one can.
Well, perhaps 15 people in the world have mastered the basics of Inter-universal Teichmüller theory, the framework Mochizuki developed for his proof, says Ivan Fesenko of the University of Nottingham, UK. He has emerged as Mochizuki’s main cheerleader in the West. According to him, about the subject to possibly comment has ever found anything to object to.
Objectors include Peter Scholze, a Fields medallist and one of the rising stars of mathematics. The proof has still not made the grade of being published in a journal, despite Mochizuki publishing a potted 300-page summary in 2017. For Fesenko, that is purely down to bad faith. “The authors of those opinions often behave irresponsibly by talking about mathematics they do not know and by misleading other people who cannot distinguish an expert from a non-expert,” he says.
Pluto is a planet
Oh no it isn’t!
Perhaps it is just sentimentality, or the influence of Disney’s lovable floppy-eared pup, but few scientific decisions have caused as much consternation as when Pluto had its planet status revoked in 2006.
Alan Stern certainly wasn’t having any of it. It was an “awful” decision, he told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ at the time. “As a scientist, I’m embarrassed.”
As head of the New Horizons mission, which had blasted off to Pluto earlier that year, he had more skin in the game than most – a fact astronomer at the California Institute of Technology has never been shy to point out. The New Horizons team just found it “emotionally difficult” they weren’t going to a planet, he is .
Brown’s Twitter handle is , and the discovery by his team in January 2005 of Eris, a body in Pluto’s neck of the woods that is by some measures bigger, played a big part in Pluto’s downgrading. But limiting planets for the sake of not having too many is ridiculous, says Stern. “Then I guess we’re going back to eight US states,” he told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ back in 2016.
This is the missing link
Oh no it isn’t!
No collection of scientific feuds would be complete without mention of those studying our human origins, where dusty old bones are ripe for picking. Few of these spats spill out onto prime-time television, but that’s exactly what happened when Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson appeared on Walter Cronkite’s Universe in 1981.
It perhaps didn’t help that the human origins of the two adversaries, both then in their 30s, were very different. Leakey came from palaeoanthropological royalty: he was the son of Louis and Mary Leakey, who had convinced the world that Africa was the cradle of humanity. Johanson was the brash American newcomer, son of a barber who had died when Donald was only two.
The beef began in 1974, when Johanson discovered a 3.2-million-year old fossil known as Lucy, which he argued was a “missing link” in our own ancestry, representing the first instance of humans having evolved to walk upright. The Leakeys argued that Lucy couldn’t possibly be one of our own.
On Cronkite’s programme, years of animosity spilled out as Leakey, challenged by Johanson to produce a hominid family tree to rival one he had sketched, instead drew a big fat cross over Johanson’s. Johanson doubled down, leading a dig in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge where the Leakeys had made their name.
Mary Leakey is reported to have removed the furnishings and equipment from the field station there before his arrival; Johanson meanwhile wrote in 1988 that he was “quite happy not having a legacy to uphold”, suggesting Richard Leakey was a hostage to his parents’ ideas.
Fortunately, this dispute has a happy ending. In 2011, 30 years older and perhaps wiser, the pair were where the original drama had happened, talking about the great unfinished business of their field – discovering the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.
String theory works
Oh no it doesn’t!
Peter Woit is unusual among scientists: he is known not for proposing an idea, but for opposing one. Since 2002, the mathematical physicist at Columbia University in New York has been the brains behind the blog .
Its subject is string theory, which proposes that fundamental particles of nature are not particles at all, but little rolled up balls of string. These exist in a universe of at least 10 dimensions, some of them also rolled up too tightly for us to see. What’s more, our cosmos is just one of a multiverse of 10500 universes, each slightly different from the last.
This might sound ropey to an untrained ear. But for many physicists, string theory remains the most reasonable way to unite our conflicting pictures of reality under one umbrella, a “theory of everything“.
Alternatively, it is just ropey. “It never seemed that promising to me,” says Woit. “I thought somebody should explain this isn’t really working out how it was supposed to.” Not only has the theory failed in 50-odd years to produce any testable prediction, but machines such as the Large Hadron Collider have failed to turn up any evidence for anything that might indicate it is pointing in even remotely the right direction. So, not even wrong.
It’s nothing personal, says Woit: “I have a lot of friends who are string theorists.” But his critical stance, cemented in a book he wrote back in 2006 also titled Not Even Wrong, has repeatedly put him in the academic crosshairs. Some have dismissed him as a crackpot, or questioned his qualification to comment on matters of theoretical physics from an office in a maths department.
In the main, though, this has been a decorous disagreement by the standards of badly behaved science – after all, it’s only the nature of the universe that’s at stake. “One Harvard faculty member did publicly call for my death,” says Woit. “But he soon left Harvard.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Oh, no it isn’t!”
