GOLIATH AND THE DINOSAURS

How many eggs could Goliath eat on an empty stomach? asked a puzzle in a children's book that I read when I was ten.

Answer: One. After that, his stomach was no longer empty.

Something similar holds for science. To what extent can you politicize it? To none whatsoever: if you do, it is no longer science.

For science is a search for truth: the search for the simplest hypothesis that will explain all pertinent observations and be con-tradicted by none. Politics, on the other hand, is the craft of gain-ing power over other people, which means using force or the threat of force. Since truth can neither be established nor de-stroyed by force, the two are not just different, but utterly incom-patible: politicized science is dry water.

Genuine science observes, measures, calculates, and deduces by logic upheld for public inspection; it takes nothing on trust.

The politicizers of science, to the contrary, are always long on trust but short on reasoning. To twist Tennyson a little, "Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to make others die."

Let me demonstrate this in a field in which I am as much a lay-man as you are, if not more so: the demise of the dinosaur.

As previously reported [AtE May 82], Nobel Prize winner Louis Alvarez proposed a simple theory: about 65 million years ago, the earth was hit by an asteroid or other heavenly body and the collision kicked up so much dust that for a number of years sunlight was blocked, causing much vegetation to die, and the re-sulting food shortage made the dinosaurs (along with many other species in the "Great Dying") extinct.

It was this theory that gave rise to the now discredited theory of Nuclear Winter by Sagan and others who do not seem capable of much original thought; the theory was not only wrong (as many genuine theories by honest scientists turn out to be), but utterly politicized. It was used by the media for a disarmament brainwash on the perfectly correct assumption that the vast ma-jority of their readers and viewers have memories so short that after the myth is demolished the media can just forget about it and in another year or two scare the pants off them with some other hoax.