Forward the Rebellion
BY ADRIAN BERRY
Posted: January 12, 2008

In 1920, in Germany, appeared an authoritative-seeming book A Hundred Scientists Against Einstein. It consisted of 100 essays by eminent people asserting that relativity was nonsense.
They were all wrong of course – most of them made the same mistake – and Einstein laconically pointed out that if a single one of them had been right then the theory of relativity would have collapsed.

They weren't Nazis or cranks (although the Nazis were later to republish the book as part of their campaign against "Jewish science".) They were conservative academics who were outraged by the lack of common sense in a popular theory which asserted that people who travelled fast enough could return younger than their own children.

Einstein himself had no time for common sense. He dismissed it as a "layer of prejudice laid down before the age of eighteen.'' He, like all great scientists who change the way we think about the world, was a rebel. He was not interested in patriotism or fashion or consensus science – or in conventional ideas about space or time or the so-called ether. He preferred simply to follow the facts wheresoever they might lead.

Charles Darwin was another rebel, even though he privately detested the role. His idea was truly revolutionary –i t showed respect for no one. It was to assert that even so august a personage as Queen Victoria was cousin to an ape.

Galileo was also a rebel who aroused hatred and hostility because he could not resist mocking and jeering at the powerful men whose disagreement with him might otherwise have been much muted. A petulant outburst by Pope Urban VIII does much to explain Galileo's martyrdom: "He did not fear to make sport of me!''

These people were aware of the mainstream of science, but they did not feel bound by it. They did the opposite of what so many scientists do today, seek a consensus of their peers before publishing. This timid policy can lead to fatal results. As we have seen in the controversy over man-made global warming, the claim of consensus is a most pernicious weapon. It is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. As the late Michael Crichton pointed out in a speech in 2003:

"The work of science has nothing to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. But science requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists are great because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc^2. Nobody says the consensus is that the Sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.''

This is not to say that anyone who abandons the consensus must be right (the world is full of flat-Earth cranks), only that to produce new and great science one must abandon it.

Even this bold course carries its risks. Suppose that you, as a budding scientist, successfully rebel against authority. Then you yourself may eventually become an authority against whom others may seek to rebel.

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Visit Adrian Berry's website at www.adrianberry.net He is Consulting Editor (Science) of the Daily Telegraph.