Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe by Mario Livio
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Unreasonable Search for Reason

Mario Livio’s book is about opportune mistakes in science. They are opportune in the sense that they produced a result which has changed scientific thinking either directly or indirectly. Although he doesn’t make it a central part of his argument, the cases he documents collectively undermine our illusions about science, illusions which are becoming increasingly obvious during the worldwide Covid-19 crisis. Rather than review Livio’s book in any detail, therefore, I think it’s more important to give a sort of appreciation of its import for our current circumstances.

Isaac Newton believed in witchcraft, astrology and alchemy. He also had a rather influential and effective theory of gravity. Pythagoras had an irrational aversion to beans, practised numerology and believed in the transmigration of souls, but also produced a geometrical theorem which is still of tremendous practical use after several millennia. Nikolai Tesla had a superstitious obsession with the number three, insisting, for example, on circling his office building three times before entering; yet he was the real genius behind most of Thomas Edison’s inventions.

In short, scientists are as neurotic as the rest of us. They do things in certain ways because... we’ll just because. Like the prize-fighter or the football player performing their good luck ritual before their match, scientists perform routines which they believe enhance the chances of achieving results. These routines are influenced by a variety of factors. Some of these factors are shared by other scientists; some not. Those that are not, scientists tend to keep quiet about - until these odd, personal, eccentric, routines result in some deviation from what is expected.

If an unexpected result is designated an error or mistake by a scientist’s colleagues, it is generally ignored. If it is accepted by the relevant scientific community, however, the result could well be considered a breakthrough, perhaps suggesting a new direction for research. Typically the scientific community isn’t unanimous in its judgment, at which point politics of the normal sort reigns. By ‘normal’ I mean that there is debate about what criterion of evaluation should be applied to the unexpected result. It is this criterion, quite literally one of value, which will establish whether the result is marked a mistake or a breakthrough (or perhaps the degree of each).

This is normal science in the sense that it is happening continuously without fuss in laboratories, conferences and professional journals. The rest of us outside professional circles rarely get a glimpse of what’s actually happening and could generally care less about the ongoing debates. Only when some significant event occurs - like a Covid-19 crisis for example - does the debate become public and the various contrary criteria which scientists in the same profession employ about what constitutes ‘good science’ become apparent. At that point they argue, often vehemently, in the popular media as well as among themselves about what constitutes success in the scientific endeavour.

The rest of us are justifiably bemused by this debate. Isn’t science a rational activity ruled by principles of reason? If we are ‘led by the science,’ as politicians keep reminding us, shouldn’t the direction we have to take be clear? Yet one professional faction calls for ‘lockdown’ and another for ‘exposure.’ And these are only the medicos. Once the economists and sociologists contribute their professional opinions, the range of recommended action is densely populated with alternatives. These disagreements are only the tip of a very large intellectual iceberg that has sunk more than a few reputation along ships. As Livio points out, the view of what constitutes science held by the great Lord Kelvin was radically different from that held by the great Einstein, which in turn was also radically different than that held by the equally great Heisenberg.

That is to say, science, of any sort, doesn’t seem more rational than any other human institution. What needs to be done is not a product of scientific method. Pick a criterion - herd immunity, overall death rates, maximum capacity for hospital admissions, mortality among distinct groups like the old, ethnic minorities, the poor, infants, or the relative cost of economic slowdown versus the prevalence of illness - and the answer to the question of ‘what to do?’ becomes fairly clear. And therein lies the issue. Rationality breaks down in the debate about the criterion of rationality. No one has a routine, a calculus, an algorithm, a method for determining which criterion of value is appropriate to use.

So a public scientific crisis like Covid-19 demonstrates just how essentially non-rational science is. Despite its pretensions, scientific thought is influenced and often directed by preferences, judgments, experiences, and beliefs which have no foundation in logic, law, or moral agreements. The choice of criterion to be applied to determine whether an individual scientific result or a global scientific programme is a mistake or an effective breakthrough is simply not one of reason. Science, whatever one means by that term, is an inadequate guide to action - just as claims of divine revelation are equally inadequate.

This may be frustrating, but it is not entirely bad news. As Mario Livio documents, it is through Brilliant Blunders that we discover the reality of disagreement about what rationality itself means. Perhaps the reality of our shared Covid-19 experience will make each of us slightly less certain of our own inherent reasonableness. The absolute priority of the search for the criterion of reason is what this viral plague has shown us. No one has a privileged position for determining the direction of this search. What we are in together is not just the disease but also the question of how we should view it.


Postscript. Here is a rather more prolix statement of my point: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n...
And here is another voice crying in the wilderness: https://aeon.co/essays/a-bioethicist-...
And here is another example of the unreasonableness of science: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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