Who's afraid of science? And why? - a response to Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's 'Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

National Review, Oct 10, 1994 by Edward Teller

According to professors at The best universities, science is a network of myths fabricated by a white male ruling class bent on keeping minorities subjugated. Now, any oppressed minority has a right to be heard, but the fact that a group has been oppressed does not guarantee it is right. That is made clear enough by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt.

The same applies to women. Is the science we know a "male" discipline, as feminist critics contend? My experience suggests not. I had the happy privilege of working closely with two of the greatest American women scientists. One was Maria Goeppert Mayer. Even as a student, she was among the best in the best period of German science. I got to know her when she returned to working in physics in Baltimore after her children started school. I take great pride in the fact that I helped Maria, after a most eventful decade in the development of physics (the years around 1930), to get back into the full swing of science. During the war years, she and her students helped to develop some of the theories that were eventually used in building the hydrogen bomb. Later, in Chicago, we worked together on the origin of the elements. In the midst of that work, she came up with the absurd idea of opposing Bohr's model of the atomic nucleus. I quite roundly criticized her. But Maria turned out to be right, and, deservedly, she received the Nobel Prize. She is not a feminist, but a scientist.

Another woman scientist, who died earlier this year, was better known to the general public: Dixy Lee Ray. She was an outstanding marine biologist, a remarkable administrator as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, a successful politician as governor of Washington State, and author of the important books Trashing the Planet and Environmental Overkill. While heading the AEC, she insisted on being called "chairman," preferring the traditional designation to any neologism. As an author, she was one of our most outspoken and convincing critics of the greenhouse and ozone-hole scares.

Of my many students, one who received a well-earned Nobel Prize was Chinese, Chen Ning Yang. With his discovery that the world is different from the mirror image of the world, he refuted a further falsehood: that science is peculiarly Western.

At the same time, anti-science sentiment persists. Americans used to approve of anything that was new, especially if it had the blessing of science. But no longer. I see two important reasons.

With the collapse of socialism and the success of America in so many ways, the reform-hungry Left lacks an object for its reformist passions. Its new slogan is: "Let,s reform science!" Given the current general ignorance about science, the New Left can argue persuasively for its view of science as the keystone of a corrupt establishment.

The second reason for the change in attitude is deeper and more important. Modern science has produced some of the most difficult and most beautiful ideas ever fashioned by man. Even the least difficult of these - Einstein's relativity theory - seems completely beyond the man in the street, and beyond most intellectuals as well. The fact that these difficult ideas have provoked disagreement among our greatest thinkers makes them all the more important. Such controversy has resulted in deep insights.

I believe that the present widespread hostility toward science will not abate except through greater understanding of the intellectual value of these ideas. But even this is only a part of the answer to the question of what is to be done. We must also consider the employment of science in solving practical problems. Since the Second World War, money has been poured into science, with results that approached flood level. The fear of those results, and of science, grew at an even faster rate. We are frightened of carbon dioxide and freon and their effect on climate and ozone. Such fears may or may not be justified, though there can be no doubt that the return of an Ice Age is a concrete possibility. What most people don't know is that, thanks to science, we now have the instruments, and we almost have the understanding, by which such a development could be stopped. A system of near-Earth, highly instrumented satellites could gather enough information to turn meteorology from an art into a real science with important practical applications.

Today most people, and particularly the academic Left, are afraid of such a development because they suspect the new knowledge could be misused. I, for my part, believe human history has demonstrated that the positive uses of new knowledge outweigh the dangerous uses to an ever increasing extent. This view of science needs to be disseminated, and that is what Paul Gross and Norman Levitt have set out to do.

They are good scientists who emphasize the constructive use of science. Theirs is the proper answer to the anti-scientific propaganda of the academic Left.