Healthy Skepticism Is Not Heresy It Is the Very Best Of Science.
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- Climate change (global warming) could benefit from a good dose of skepticism.
Paul Steinhardt is certainly no scientific heretic. He is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of Theoretical Science at Princeton University so when he writes in ASTRONOMY magazine that “The Big Bang may not have been instant of creation but a single event in an infinite cycle” people listen, and carefully. His article’s argument involves membrane theory or “branes” that I confess near utter ignorance about but no more so that the string theory. Not since scientist and Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître proposed the primordial atom and Big Bang has there been such hubbub.
Steinhardt’s theory is that the Universe pulses inferring - at least to me - that there could be more than one such event in a vastness defying all but the most fertile imaginations. To be sure he is rocking science’s boat raising the age old admonition to be more careful of what you know as what you do not.
Like almost everything else in science uncertainty is a fact as evidenced in the current discussion or debate about climate change, and if its exists its causes and solutions. About the only thing certain is that the globes climate changes.
I have an acquaintance, an environmental scientist teaching in Australia and the Caribbean who is convinced water vapor if the atmospheric agent of greatest concern. So far he only has a few adherents. Personally I am undecided about water vapor’s role.
His and Dr. Steinhardt’s theories are controversial, and that is the issue and point.
Before we hurtle off another cliff let’s recall that that a little more than 100-years ago the great British scientist Lord Kelvin said that radio waves had no practical use, x-rays were a hoax, and heavier than air flight impossibility. It was just 25-years before the development of the A-bomb that Nobel Laureate Robert Millikin said that humans would never tap the power of the atom. We now know very differently.
I certainly do not seek to diminish any of these scientific giants but rather use them and their beliefs and theories - all carefully reasoned and with adherents galore in their moments — as evidence for caution before we collectively risk plummeting off the cliff or at the least attach a bungee cord.