Let me try to sum up. On the one hand, we have a large number of true but commonplace ideas, especially about how simple rules can lead to complex outcomes, and about the virtues of toy models. On the other hand, we have a large mass of dubious speculations (many of them also unoriginal). We have, finally, a single new result of mathematical importance, which is not actually the author’s. Everything is presented as the inspired fruit of a lonely genius, delivering startling insights in isolation from a blinkered and philistine scientific community. We have been this way before.
[Some cranks] are brilliant and well-educated, often with an excellent understanding of the branch of science in which they are speculating. Their books can be highly deceptive imitations of the genuine article — well-written and impressively learned….
[C]ranks work in almost total isolation from their colleagues. Not isolation in the geographical sense, but in the sense of having no fruitful contacts with fellow researchers…. The modern pseudo-scientist… stands entirely outside the closely integrated channels through which new ideas are introduced and evaluated. He works in isolation. He does not send his findings to the recognized journals, or if he does, they are rejected for reasons which in the vast majority of cases are excellent. In most cases the crank is not well enough informed to write a paper with even a surface resemblance to a significant study. As a consequence, he finds himself excluded from the journals and societies, and almost universally ignored by competent workers in the field….. The eccentric is forced, therefore, to tread a lonely way. He speaks before organizations he himself has founded, contributes to journals he himself may edit, and — until recently — publishes books only when he or his followers can raise sufficient funds to have them printed privately.Thus Martin Gardner’s classic description of the crank scientist in the first chapter of his Fads and Fallacies. In lieu of superfluous comments, let us pass on to Gardner’s list of the “five ways in which the sincere pseudo-scientist’s paranoid tendencies are likely to be exhibited.”
- He considers himself a genius.
- He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads. Everyone is out of step except himself….
- He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against….
- He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. When Newton was the outstanding name in physics, eccentric works in that science were violently anti-Newton. Today, with Einstein the father-symbol of authority, a crank theory of physics is likely to attack Einstein in the name of Newton….
- He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined….
(1) is clearly true. (2) is clearly true. (3) is currently false, or at least not much on display in this book. (4) is clearly true, though Wolfram, befitting someone who was once a respectable physicist, aims to undermine Newton and Einstein, indeed the entire tradition of physical science since Galileo. (5) is true only to a very small degree (mercifully).
When the crank’s I.Q. is low, as in the case of the late Wilber Glenn Voliva who thought the earth shaped like a pancake, he rarely achieves much of a following. But if he is a brilliant thinker, he is capable of developing incredibly complex theories. He will be able to defend them in books of vast erudition, with profound observations, and often liberal portions of sound science. His rhetoric may be enormously persuasive. All the parts of his world usually fit together beautifully, like a jig-saw puzzle.The natural result is a cult following. Wolfram certainly has that, to judge from his sales, the attendance at his “New Kind of Science” conventions, and the reader reviews on Amazon. (I presume they are not all a claque hired by Wolfram Media.) This frankly is part of a disturbing trend, pronounced within the field of complex systems. In addition to Wolfram, I might mention the cult of personality around Ilya Prigogine, and Stuart Kauffman’s book Investigations, or even the way George Lakoff uses “as cognitive science shows” to mean “as I claimed in my earlier books”.
Cosma Shalizi, on Stephen Wolfram and his book A New Kind of Science
Unfortunately, the world of science is full of cranks. To make things worse, only a few of them are “brilliant thinkers”, as Cosma Shalizi admits it when referring to Wolfram. The rest are just a bunch of frustrated scientists, trying to reach the top by engaging in irrelevant research, disguised as novelty or new science (the “so what” research, if you allow me to steal the expression from Agostinho). We all know a few of them.
(On another field of knowledge, one could question if the overrated philosopher Friedrich Hegel, the master of jargon, was not some kind of crank. Well, he sure founded a perverse way of “thinking”, and we shall not discard the hypothesis that he was the father of all the Wolframs in this world. Furthermore, his dependence on the political establishment – the King of Prussia, Frederick William III – somehow reminds us that the decline of Though in western civilization – of which we are now more aware – in the beginning of the XXI century, is mainly due to the gradual loss of independence from the political power. We are treading dangerous paths, when accepting public funding for research that not only comes with rules and directives from governments and burocrats, but also reflects modern trends that are more devoted to ideology, utopia or prejudice, than to the methods of modern science. Just try to submit a project that aims at refuting the theory of the anthropogenic origins of the global warming, and then you will know what I mean.)
Carlos Miguel Fernandes
