Science vs. Superstition: 400 Years Later

In 1610 Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the night sky and immediately began poking holes in the astronomical misconceptions of his day. The moon was not smooth, but had mountains and craters. The earth was not the only body around which others revolved; he could see four moons around Jupiter, for instance. The sun was not an unblemished ball of light; it had dark spots on its surface and irregular prominences projecting out from it. Saturn was surrounded by a giant ring. The planets appeared to revolve around the sun, not the earth, as religious authorities insisted. Copernicus was therefore right and Aristotle and the Church were wrong. Such heresies would not be tolerated for long. Galileo soon found himself under torture and on trial for his life.

These were the opening volleys in a historical showdown that has come to be known as the Scientific Revolution. During the crucial seventeenth century, the forces of logic, fact and reality slowly gained the upper hand over the dead hand of superstition, dogma and vested interest. The effort culminated in 1687 with Isaac Newton's axial Principia Mathematica, which formulated the laws of motion and whose calculations unveiled the workings of universal gravitation. Science, logic and mathematics had laid bare the machinery of the physical universe. Inquisitors, witch burners and Luddites would fight diminishing rear-guard actions against reason in the years ahead, but their following shrank year by year as the wonders and mysteries of the world revealed their secrets to the scientific method and the functional marvels it spawned, including in turn the steam engine, electricity, powered flight, antibiotics and space travel.

Now, remarkably, exactly 400 years since the Scientific Revolution began, it is once again coming under increasing attack, at least in the United States of America. Here, the fact and reality-based worldview appears to be losing ground to a combination of vested interest group advertising and wishful-thinking know-nothingism. My regional newspaper had a guest opinion piece today by a scientist that may seem poignant if it is remembered sometime in the future. UC Merced Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Engineering Anthony L. Westerling, writing in the Fresno Bee, told of a symposium his university will be sponsoring beginning Monday on "the dramatic disparity between perceptions by the public and the scientific community" regarding climate change.

Though the evidence gathered by science demonstrates that, "the conclusion that the observed warming can only be explained by human causes has only strengthened over time," he reports that "numerous polls" including "a Gallup poll made public last month found that a large and increasing number of Americans believe that the seriousness of climate change has been exaggerated, that it will not post a serious threat within their lifetimes, and that it is not caused by humans." He backs this up with data, of course, as scientific types tend to do, even saying that the by-now standard skeptic theory that the sun is heating up is dead wrong, that instead "variations in the energy from the sun would have produced a decrease in temperature were it not for the warming caused by human actions."

It will be interesting to see what the Sigma Xi Research Society is able to come up with in the symposium this coming week. Climatologists will speak on the data, its relation to the recently held Copenhagen Diagnosis will be explained, others will discuss popular misconceptions that hinder the public's understanding of science and another seminar will "address how special interests and the media have contributed to confusion" about the issue. In case you can make it, it will take place in UC Merced's Lakireddy Auditorium. The Monday session goes from 1:30 to 5:00 P.M. It is free of charge and will be open to the public.