#WEIRD SCIENCE TAB MOVIE#

Since the 1990s, increasing numbers of parents have seceded their children from once-mandatory school vaccination requirements, taking advantage of the religious or even “philosophical” objections to vaccination permitted by many states.

(Some of these voices come from fully credentialed scientists who do scientific research for a living.) This might all seem new, and it is - just not as new as you might imagine. Whatever the official guidance, you will find those who “do their own research” attacking it. The raging pandemic has raised the volume: mountains of criticism are now being lobbed or hurled at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (it’s too slow, too fast, too politicized, too politicized in the wrong direction) and at misinformation/resistance/hesitancy/denial about vaccines, masks, and tests. Scientists across the board have expressed righteous consternation about these matters, but they are not the only ones grousing about contemporary science. Alongside these egregious forms of academic misconduct, there have been a host of others, such as plagiarism, gaming the metrics that get scientists promoted through fraudulent citations and affiliations, and laundering cooked industry numbers through ghostwriting. Meanwhile, popular and scientific periodicals alike have been bursting with incidents of scientific fraud or misconduct (in some cases alleged, in others confirmed): Jan-Hendrik Schön’s organic semiconductors at Bell Labs (2002), Victor Ninov’s reported discovery of elements 116 and 118 at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (2002), Hwang Woo-Suk’s claim to have cloned human embryonic stem cells (2005), Marc Hauser’s evolutionary psychology announcing advanced cognition in rather unprepossessing cotton-top tamarins (2010), among others. Since replicability is frequently held up as one of the most significant indications that science generates reliable knowledge, the pervasiveness of such failings is truly worrisome. Salient among these is the “replication crisis,” principally in psychology and biomedicine, which has rather shockingly shown that many of the canonical findings in, say, cognitive psychology and cancer genetics are unreplicable by other scientists. If you have been following science communication for the past 15 years or so, you will have come across countless discussions of what might be considered “pathologies” in science. This surge of attention to the fringes of science has not just happened within the boutique field of the history of science. These are not fringe scholars nor are their books marginal: each was awarded the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society, for “books in the history of science directed to a wide public,” in 2011, 2013, and 2014 respectively. Patrick McCray, published The Visioneers (Princeton University Press), a detailed analysis of space colony and nanotechnology enthusiasts (and the occasional pornographer) in the ’70s and ’80s, after which nanotechnology alone escaped the badlands and was embraced as a staple of materials science. In 2012, yet another historian of science, W.

#WEIRD SCIENCE TAB MOVIE#

(A movie adaptation has since appeared.) The following year, Norton released MIT historian David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics, which followed countercultural physics graduate students in the 1970s who explored, among other quantum questions, the theory of faster-than-light travel and the practice of hallucinogenic drugs. Conway published Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury), which traced the careers of a small group of scientists who were instrumental in spreading theories that denied tobacco smoke’s negative impact on human health, or acid rain’s on the environment, or anthropogenic climate change’s on absolutely everything. In 2010, historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Bookshelves are buckling under the weight of history books about the oddities of science. More than two decades into the 21st century, that exchange would go quite differently. Aside from a brief flourishing in a few pockets of the sociology of science, principally in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, “disreputable” topics did not promise a path to glory. He had (still has) an impressive command of the field, and he was not wrong. To be clear, he was being entirely supportive. Her new advisor cautioned, “If you work on fringy things, people might begin to think you are fringy” (or something to that effect I wasn’t there). She had done impressive research as an undergraduate in one of the byways of not-so-respectable science - spoon bending, phrenology, UFOs - and was considering whether to continue in the same vein.

ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO, shortly after I had finished graduate school in the history of science, a friend was entering the field at a different university.

Weird science tab