Science simony

Our own commenter Shopwindows recently coined the excellent Virgilian aphorism for corruption in science: “I do not trust Geeks bearing grifts.” Physicist and YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder gives an excellent, and disturbing, example of this not in the politically controversial fields like climatology or vaccinology, but in fundamental science.

In this video she reveals, after seven years of soul-searching, the contents of an e-mail she received after publishing an article in Nature Physics on the loss of respect for science. She was asked not to reveal this communication, but has felt compelled to do so (whilst still respecting the anonymity of the sender) because of the continued deterioration in the integrity of science as a whole, and consequently in the respect with which it is held by the public.

Essentially the e-mail agreed, professional physicist to professional physicist, that their trade is now a scam, in which eye-wateringly large government funding is used for mainly useless, and often erroneous, research. The now-familiar root causes (especially since the revelations about NSAID) are all on display – funding agencies with poor understanding of science but an eye for a politically impressive project like discovering the “basic building blocks of the universe”; universities scrabbling for grant money and press-coverage by proposing similarly important sounding research; academic battles for prestige and power (not to mention the lucrative spin-offs from scientific celebrity); and the universal tendency for governments to use taxpayer money to build ever-enlarging bureaucracies.

The e-mail, though, attempts to justify all this grift by two main arguments. The first is to remind Sabine how many scientists, after years of hardship and training, now depend on these useless research projects to pay their mortgages, send their kids to school and so on. The second is that Joe Public simply loves to hear about all the apparently exciting and true things that physics is discovering, and even if they knew how much it was costing them, would not begrudge it when they saw how a Giant Hadron Collider the size of Europe has discovered that the existence of matter depends on Higgs the Boatswain, or something equally esoteric.

Behind all this venality the writer admits that every physicist involved in the business, at least at high enough levels to understand the scam, are pretty cynical about it all, but realise that this is the way the world of science is, and that it’s a game you must learn to negotiate in order to pay the bills, let alone climb the career ladder. For puritans like Sabine Hossenfelder to let the cat out of the bag is doing a disservice to the thousands of grifters colleagues who would otherwise be unemployed.

Sabine, of course, being such a puritanical seeker after truth rather than a mere jobsworth, is appalled at this level of cynicism. If the e-mail had come from a disgruntled PhD-hunting research assistant, one could dismiss it as the product of mere resentment or general nihilism. But on her testimony, the e-mail was from a leading researcher in the field of particle physics, whose name might well be familiar to many were she to reveal it. Her attitude, which is nowadays showing itself to be that of most members of the public who become disillusioned with the corruption in science, is that people are happy to pay tax money for science that is useful, and happy that brilliant and inquisitive people get paid by someone to uncover genuine wonders of the universe, even when they lack practical application. But they are not happy, given how much harder life is for most of them than for most tenured academics, to support a self-regarding ecosystem of spongers pulling the wool over their eyes about trivial or dubious research that invariably costs a king’s ransom.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, much of the problem comes, as Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned, from allowing government to get involved in science commissioning in the first place, using other people’s money. Governments are incapable of controlling spending, and foster the kind of intellectual and moral dependence culture that turns not only physics, and not even just science, into a system to be gamed cynically. Here are a couple of illustrations from varied, non-physics, fields.

Fifty years ago, one of my friends on graduating as an engineer went to work for one of Britain’s arms developers. Before he gave up and trained for the pastoral ministry, he confided to me that the whole project he was working on was actually a fake to fool the Soviet Union, for some cloak and dagger reason ordered, presumably, by Government Intelligence. If you actually love engineering rather than simply collecting a paycheck and a pension, imagine the frustration of knowing, outside of a genuine national emergency, that your work is a mere pretence. A good engineer will get out, as my friend did, and his skills be lost to the nation, leaving mediocre greasy-pole merchants to end up running the sham and collecting their knighthoods. If the Soviets happened to be concentrating on real weapons development, the next war would dispel all the comfortable illusions.

In politics itself, Anthony Bridgen reports how he was told by David Cameron, early on in his parliamentary career, when he was finding it impossible to get some serious policy issues addressed, that the parliamentary system is a game, the implication being that Bridgen should learn the rules and stick to them. Because he never did, he was marginalised, expelled from the Conservative party, and eventually levered out of his seat. The game has continued, though, and is now clearly destroying the country.

In biology, a Christian who was, at the time, seeking tenure insisted to me that any attempt to include the possibility of divine action in science is inadmissible, not because of evidence, or because naturalistic materialism is intrinsically a part of natural science, but because those are the rules of the scientific game. The most worrying thing about that prioritising of professional convention over truth becomes clear from Sabine Hossenfelder’s e-mail video: scientists are quite capable of prioritising game-rules of dishonesty, financial fraud and public deception over a genuine concern for the truth of nature. If a scientist is willing to sacrifice even his God on the altar of professional acceptance, then scientific integrity is small beer in comparison.

To conclude, let me just drive home what you will already have deduced for yourself. Fundamental physics is, to the innocent eye, the least likely discipline of all to be tainted by money, power, sex or ideology. If, as evidenced by Hossenfelder’s video, it is largely a scam, then what can we say about medical research, controlled by government and Big Pharma; or climatology, funded by government and ideologically driven NGOs from Greenpeace to the WHO; or astronautics, funded by government and manufacturers selling tickets to ET life; or psychology, funded by government (keen to control dissent) and ideologically captured academia; or any of the other quasi-scientific disciplines in which your livelihood (or if you’re lucky, your fortune) depends on believing a narrative rather than the truth? We can only conclude that science, like politics, show business, the arts, and even the Church, will tend towards corruption apart from the grace of God.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9)

And that is why any attempt to reform our groaning civilisation that does not take God’s grace into account – meaning through repentance and faith in the living Christ – can only produce more of the same falsehood, perhaps in even more demonic guise.