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    Science and Pseudoscience - A Conversation with Michael Gordin
    Science and Pseudoscience - A Conversation with Michael Gordin
    Science and Pseudoscience - A Conversation with Michael Gordin
    Ebook101 pages1 hourIdeas Roadshow Conversations Series

    Science and Pseudoscience - A Conversation with Michael Gordin

    By Howard Burton

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    About this ebook

    This book is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Michael Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University. This thought-provoking, extensive conversation examines the strange case of Immanuel Velikovsky, author of the bestselling book “Worlds in Collision” that managed to provocatively combine unbridled scientific speculation with ancient myth, as a way of probing the often-problematic boundary between science and pseudoscience.

    By all accounts, Velikovsky was a decidedly curious character. The notorious Russian-born doctor-turned psychoanalyst-turned astronomer-historian-autodidact not only had a flair for writing and boatloads of charisma and energy, he also was on record for making a couple of concrete predictions of his radical new theory of the solar system that turned out, much to the dismay of the authorities of the day, to actually be correct.

    This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, Harnessing the Fringe, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter:

    I. A Counterculture Hero - Introducing Immanuel Velikovsky
    II. An Ideal Case - The historical allure of Velikovsky
    III. The Lysenko Lesson - Science meets politics
    IV. A Freudian Cosmology - Validation by hostility
    V. Enter Einstein - Velikovsky makes predictions
    VI. Responses and Reactions - Publicity and hostility
    VII. Digging In - Unorthodox, up to a point
    VIII. Science vs. Pseudoscience - In search of a bright line
    IX. Fringe Benefits - Seeking a balance
    X. Learning From History - Towards better science?
    XI. Anthropic Digression - Falsifiability today
    XII. Better Science? - Educated by history

    About Ideas Roadshow Conversations Series:

    This book is part of an expanding series of 100+ Ideas Roadshow conversations, each one presenting a wealth of candid insights from a leading expert in a focused yet informal setting to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldn't otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks. For other books in this series visit our website: https://ideasroadshow.com/.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIdeas Roadshow
    Release dateOct 1, 2020
    ISBN9781771700542
    Science and Pseudoscience - A Conversation with Michael Gordin

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      Book preview

      Science and Pseudoscience - A Conversation with Michael Gordin - Howard Burton

      GORDIN_REV.jpg

      Ideas Roadshow conversations present a wealth of candid insights from some of the world’s leading experts, generated through a focused yet informal setting. They are explicitly designed to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldn’t otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks.

      Over 100 Ideas Roadshow conversations have been held since our debut in 2012, covering a wide array of topics across the arts and sciences.

      See www.ideas-on-film.com/ideasroadshow for a full listing.

      Copyright ©2014, 2020 Open Agenda Publishing. All rights reserved.

      ISBN: 978-1-77170-054-2

      Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.

      All Ideas Roadshow Conversations use Canadian spelling.

      Contents

      A Note on the Text

      Introduction

      The Conversation

      I. A Counterculture Hero

      II. An Ideal Case

      III. The Lysenko Lesson

      IV. A Freudian Cosmology

      V. Enter Einstein

      VI. Responses and Reactions

      VII. Digging In

      VIII. Science vs. Pseudoscience

      IX. Fringe Benefits

      X. Learning From History

      XI. Anthropic Digression

      XII. Better Science?

      Continuing the Conversation

      A Note on the Text

      The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Michael Gordin in Princeton, New Jersey, on June 7, 2014.

      Michael Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University.

      Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

      Introduction

      Harnessing the Fringe

      Years ago, when I found myself in charge of a theoretical physics institute, I used to receive a steady stream of letters and emails from highly frustrated, would-be-scientific revolutionaries, anxious to tell me about their work.

      Typically, they would explain how the scientific community had rejected them out of hand on sociological grounds, simply because their work went too far against the prevailing orthodoxy. Often they would compare their circumstances—if not themselves—to those of Einstein, struggling away in secret with his transformative ideas about the universe while working at a Swiss patent office. Inevitably, too, it might bear mentioning, they were all men.

      I quickly learned that any physicist who has ever been in any position of authority anywhere has received a significant number of such letters. The most common response is to simply ignore them. My approach was always to write back a short reply thanking them for their time and effort, but explaining that I didn’t have the time to go through their work in proper detail. If they had, indeed, found some transformative insight, I responded evenly, I urged them to formally submit their results to the appropriate journals for consideration like everybody else.

      Of course, this was somewhat duplicitous. I knew very well that the reason they had approached me (in addition to virtually anyone else they could find an email address for) was that no established journal would ever seriously consider wading through their invariably dense wad of notes, let alone publishing it.

      What passed for a certain form of politeness, then, was hardly anything that justified my place on a higher moral plane—like everyone else, I, too, hoped that these fringe figures would just go away and leave me alone.

      Yet, in the back of my mind, I always wondered. Not, as it happens, that their claims of possessing a revolutionary insight might turn out to be correct—I am sceptical enough to believe that the chances of that happening were, statistically, vanishingly small—but more sociologically speaking: what keeps these people going, day after day, perpetually encountering an unequivocal wall of rejection, if not outright hostility, from the scientific authorities? Why wilfully remain mired on the outside of the big tent of science? After all, the global scientific effort is quite different now than it was more than a century ago in Einstein’s day. For anyone anxious to make some sort of a contribution to the scientific effort, there is always somewhere that will accept you to at least do an undergraduate degree, if not a PhD.

      The cynical answer is that they are all simply crazy and don’t have the intellectual resources necessary to make their way through even the most basic technical material, let alone a doctoral program somewhere. But something about that response always struck me as being too pat. Doubtless it was the case for some. But likely not all.

      So it was with a particular interest that I picked up Michael Gordin’s intriguing book, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. I am old enough to (just barely) remember the name Immanuel Velikovsky, the charismatic rebel who wrote (among others) the bestselling book Worlds in Collision that managed to provocatively combine unbridled scientific speculation with ancient myth.

      By all accounts, Velikovsky was a decidedly curious character. The notorious Russian-born doctor–turned psychoanalyst–turned astronomer-historian-autodidact not only had a flair for writing and boatloads of charisma and energy, he also was on record for making a couple of concrete predictions of his radical new theory of the solar system that turned out, much to the dismay of the authorities of the day, to actually be correct.

      Here, then, was a specific, compelling, historical instance that could be carefully studied to examine how science had deliberately separated itself from pseudoscience, and why.

      The full story of Immanuel Velikovsky turns out to be even more fascinating than one might expect, combining elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, Cold War paranoia, ancient mythology, NASA press conferences, 1960s counterculture and a good deal more besides. It’s not too hard to see why Michael, as a professional historian of science, would pick such a captivatingly good yarn.

      But to me, always lurking in the background were the broader issues: How

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