Have we got too serious, or plainly too boring ? Or maybe we, as a scientific community but also each of us individually, have just become responsible, tax-payers money minded, general public power aware members of the society ? (Ouch!)
These questions have come to me once I bumped rather serendipitously on this Nature paper ... Have you clicked on the link yet ? Surprised ? Click again to double check. Still there ? I bet it is. Not going to go anywhere, eh ?!
A 1985 commentary in a very respectable, to say the least, and strictly scientific journal Nature, delving into the issues of ... astrology. Woow ! Rest assure though - no damage is made and the conclusions are "right" as a "doubly blind test" proposed by the paper's author confirms no statistically valid basis to at least some of the astrological claims. The experimental approach is well thought through, and the statistical analysis sound. So everything is formally ok ?! Yeah, but ...
Could you imagine a paper like this being publish in the very same journal today ? Mere 25 years later but it is really hard to picture this happening again. Nature accepting and publishing work of this sort on the one hand, and a graduate student (and now a president of a for-profit "citizen-scientist" organization and a future at that time MacArthur "genius" award recipient) of a renowned higher education institution (University of California at Berkeley) indulging himself in this kind of line of research with an explicit support of his PhD supervisor (yet another then already actual MacArthur prize awardee) on the other. And then add to that, editors, reviewers, program board, etc, i.e., a small army (figuratively) of people colluding in getting this paper out, consenting that this the right thing to do ... Not just a single maverick author's oddball act then !
What has changed over that quarter of the century ? Why something clearly possible then does not seem so nowadays ? Or at least not without some community backlash against daring 'transgressors', say, in a form a small and almost cuddling label of "a wacky scientist' ... (perhaps an honor but not really your MacArthur award ...)
Have we got too serious about ourselves, or we are just too boring (and scared) to think "outside of the box" ? Or maybe rather too responsible ? For good or bad ? Not curious enough any more ? Options are clearly abundant but I reckon the correct explanation is probably more likely along the lines "we know the answer and have no doubts and thus are unwilling to waste our time and energy on investigating this kind of problems". This of course does not exclude some of the other options mentioned earlier, in fact that may simply mean that we have got indeed rather boring ... ;-)
Well as an exponent of a general attitude that sounds somewhat dangerous for a scientist, but in this rather flagrant specific issue I presume it is indeed the case. We have no doubt. We do not care to bother then. But does that mean that any soundly thinking scientist in mid-80 of the last century still had some doubts about the scientific value of the astrology ? Hardly believe that.
So again ... What has changed ?
My general feeling is that it is something close to a case of loss of an innocence - a case of the scientific community, giving up of changing some general conceptions deeply engraved, or just commercially supported perception - if you wish - in the society as a whole, and instead opting to engage with the general public in a more constructive and positive way. We have then given up of talking of the horoscopes in favor of presenting the general relativity. Pragmatic it certainly is: if we can not win here, we will attack somewhere else, explain what public readily admits to be ignorant of, rather than try changing its (collective) mind about things it seems to covet. But there is a price to pay. Sooner or later we end up with a "don't ask' policy in some of the areas of our life. So is that a win ? A defeat ? Or just a clever, "lay-down and wait" maneuver, built on a hope that the society, once its fluent in the general relativity, will purge itself of this kind of misconceptions naturally and voluntarily. Or maybe a form of a cynical pragmatism stemmed from a fear that by our inappropriate, or even juvenile, insistence on calling some (false) things false, we would just achieve that even fewer funds will trickle our way ?
Obviously all kinds of scientific crusaders are out there, working incessantly to spread the truth to the public. As they see it. Asked or not. But even if they are professional scientists they usually conduct their crusade "outside of the box" of its professional activities. They also use other means that professional journals in their quest.
So lo and behold something seems to have indeed changed ...
Or maybe it is just too much to try to infer from a single 25 years old paper ... ? Well could be. But then again where would we, cosmologists, be if we did not at least try ! ;-)
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