Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Larry Krauss Being a Doofus

Larry Krauss, who I used to have some respect for, seems to be giving up theoretical physics to follow the well worn road that Bertrand Russell took when he had to abandon his second career in philosophy and Richard Dawkins followed as his evo-psy has reached the stage of full maturity and is showing serious signs of rot.   Krauss is going from making some rather moderate statements on the new atheists, encouraging them not to oversell what science can do by way of promoting athiesm, to going full new atheist.   I strongly suspect that he has gotten far, far more attention and, perhaps, per-hour remuneration, from his more recent religion bashing than he did from being a prominent theoretical physicist*.

He's got a "Big Think" YouTube up in which he says that teaching children about creationism is "child abuse" and similar to what the Taliban does.

Krauss is 1000% right that the teaching of biology should be free of extra-scientific ideas, certainly in the public schools.   Really in all of them but the law can't restrict private schools in the same way.   But his language is so absurdly overblown  that he leaves himself open for a charge of hypocrisy. More about that in a minute.   If he really believes that telling a child about creationism is child abuse then he would have to approve of it being illegal to do that.   He'd have to approve of prosecutions of parents or grandparents who read their children the first chapters in Genesis, no doubt turned in by their children.  Not to mention Sunday School teachers.   With his Taliban comparison, maybe he'd suggest that parents who tell their children the story of Adam and Eve be sent to Gitmo or taken out with some of the emerging products of the same science and technology he mentions.   Hey, if he can go all overblown, why can't I?

Krauss makes his accusation on the entirely correct basis that a literal belief in the biblical creation stories is scientifically wrong.   Then he ties in predictions of dire consequences for society and even the economy, which I'd like to see him support with actual examples from real people in society.  For just about anyone who doesn't deal with evolutionary science as part of their work, a knowledge of it has all of the impact on their lives as a knowledge of  the early years of the Holy Roman Empire.     I doubt that a belief in the story of the talking snake really has a major economic impact. But, perhaps, Krauss believes he, out of his superior status as a theoretical physicist dealing with inanimate objects, can spout the truth without the vulgar evidence of those kinds of real life examples.

Before his new atheist star turn, Lawrence Krauss was, perhaps, most famous in the general population for a paper he and some colleagues wrote a few years aback in which they called into doubt the possibility of the formation of black holes.  The idea interested me because he noted that if time stops at the event horizon of a black hole, things couldn't fall into it, or at least that was my understanding of the very complicated argument.  It sounded plausible to me, though I'd never take a position on it.   I don't know if he's still pushing that conclusion but I remember reading him saying that there were alternative explanations in collapsing stars to explain the appearances suggestive of black holes, which, as he pointed out, no one had actually observed.

I was also curious as to the consequences if black holes were debunked.   There is nothing in science that has figured so heavily in recent pop-culture as black holes.   They are scary, destructive, enormously powerful, inevitable and have purported powers mysterious enough and spooky enough to have fueled many a totally crappy plot line in sci-fi books, sy-fy TV, movies, and I'd guess video games.   Black holes have sold, big time.  If those were debunked I predicted the consequences for the public acceptance of science would be disastrous.  I've become increasingly convinced that a lot of the public resistance to science is due, in no small part, to instances in which it was massively oversold.

But, coming back to Larry Krauss's recent cry for attention.   If he was right and black holes aren't real, isn't teaching children about them as much a violation of reality as teaching them creationism? Wouldn't Krauss, to maintain his most basic intellectual integrity, HAVE TO DECLARE THAT TEACHING CHILDREN ABOUT BLACK HOLES IS ALSO CHILD ABUSE?   And what can be said about that can be said about enormous areas of theoretical science which will not pan out and the numerous instances of pseudo-science now taught as "social science" but will likely be overturned before the child reaches middle-age.   I recall being taught "science" as validating Freudianism, as it fell into an intellectual black hole as well as parts of its successor, behaviorism, now having followed it into that bleak apocalypse.   I, still being 16 when I had that course, should Dr. Ford be hauled out of his long retirement to stand trial?

Of course Krauss won't do that.  Black holes are to old sci-rangers what T rex is to so many young ones, massively popular due to being what was noted above.   His attack on their reality would not do his burgeoning second career any good with the fan base he will have to attract.   Intellectual integrity be damned, he's not about to risk that.   I suspect that the attention he got from his black hole paper might have given him a taste for celebrity,  which can be as addictive as Oxycontin.   It generally doesn't do much for the integrity of a scientist, historian, philosopher, etc. when they go for that pill.   It certainly seems to be turning someone I used to respect into a pill.


*  As I've suggested before, go to the "Scienceblogs" and see how many hits the bloggers who are all-science, all the time get as compared to the religion bashers.  Religion bashing sells far better than serious science.

Update:   Rereading this post to see what things I missed while editing, it came to me that if black holes are real, then Krauss and his colleagues were risking becoming child abusers by dissing the idea.   Maybe all theoretical work should be suppressed until the verification of those in observation of nature is in hand, making them safe for the public understanding of science.   Otherwise the scientific thinking of the masses might be damaged with bad ideas.  Imagine what the suppression of black holes might have done to make crappy sci-fi of the past century less easy to write.

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