The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-deception and Human Frailty

by WalterGratzer (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.46

  The theme of this work is scientific foible. Gratzer describes for a general readership a number of episodes in science and medicine where an erroneous research finding was adhered to and given credence by its originators and others far beyond the point where it had been effectively discredited. Each of these episodes is dealt with in detail, with special attention given to the individuals involved, their careers and personalities, their relations with others, and so on. The accounts include the affair of the N-rays, Lysenko and the tragedy of Soviet genetics, science in the Third Reich, the tale of polywater, and the cold-fusion aberration of the 1980s.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.46

  Walter Gratzer's themes in the stories he relates in this book are collective delusion and human folly. Science is generally seen as a process bound by rigorous rules, which its practitioners must not transgress. Deliberate fraud occasionally intrudes, but it is soon detected, the perpetrators cast out and the course of discovery barely disturbed. Far more interesting are the outbreaks of self-delusion that from time to time afflict upright and competent researchers, and then spread like an epidemic or mass-hysteria through a sober and respectable scientific community. When this happens the rules by which scientists normally govern their working lives are suddenly suspended. Sometimes these episodes are provoked by personal vanity, an unwillingness to acknowledge error or even contemplate the possibility that a hard-won success is a will o' the wisp; at other times they stem from loyalty to a respected and trusted guru, or even from patriotic pride; and, worst of all, they may be a consequence of a political ideology which imposes its own interpretation on scientists' observations of the natural world. Unreason and credulity supervene, illusory phenomena are described and measured, and theories are developed to explain them - until suddenly, often for no single reason, the bubble bursts, leaving behind it a residue of acrimony, recrimination, embarrassment, and ruined reputations. Here, then, are radiations, measured with high precision yet existing only in the minds of those who observed them; the Russian water, which some thought might congeal the oceans; phantom diseases that called for heroic surgery; monkey testis implants that restored the sexual powers of ageing roues and of tired sheep; truths about genetics and about the nature of matter, perceptible only to Aryan scientists in the Third Reich or Marxist ideologues in the Soviet Union; and much more. The Undergrowth of Science explores, in terms accessible to the lay reader, the history of such episodes, up to our own time, in all their absurdity, tragedy, and pathos.