Yep, it’s National Public Radio again, and again the cosmos & culture blog, where Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth, has taken it upon himself to tell us that a). science can go “too far”, and b). it does so when scientists cling to beliefs that are either largely refuted or a bit shaky, a recalcitrance he sees as a form of “faith.”

Unfortunately, his article, “Can scientific belief go too far?“, fails to make a strong case that science does go too far.  In fact, he cites only two examples (of course there are more) where scientists have been resistant to accepting a new paradigm, or cling to an old one when the data are equivocal.

The first is simply some physicists’ refusal in past decades to accept the quantum-mechanics conclusion that nature is fundamentally indeterminate:

In the classical world, the one we see around us, nature made sense — events following a nice chain of cause and effect — what we call determinism. In the quantum world, this certainty had to be placed aside: The properties of matter, of electrons in atoms, for example, had to be described by probabilities. However, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger and other great scientists involved in developing the theory refused to accept its apparent randomness as final. They believed that, deep down, nature had to follow simple causal rules, that determinism would triumph in the end.

This kind of posture, when there is a persistent holding on to a belief that is continually contradicted by facts, can only be called faith. In the quantum case, it’s faith in an ordered, rational nature, even if it reveals itself through random behavior. “God doesn’t play dice,” wrote Einstein to his colleague Max Born. His conviction led him and others to look for theories that could explain the quantum probabilities as manifestations of a deeper order. And they failed. (And we now know that this randomness will not go away, being the very essence of quantum phenomena.)

Well, I’m not sure this qualifies as any kind of faith, much less the religious sort. Until much later, with Bell’s Theorem and its proof, doubt still remained whether nature was truly, provably indeterminate. Einstein et al. (I’m not sure whether Schrödinger and Planck ever came around to indeterminacy) were simply slow to accept a new paradigm that went against everything that every physicist believed about nature. Is that “slowness” a kind of “faith” when there was still the possible of determinism behind the indeterminism? And, at any rate, nearly all physicists now accept indeterminacy, so what’s the point of saying that “scientific belief” went too far? Einstein’s belief was recalcitrant, but he was but one physicist among many.

The point, I think—though Gleiser is a scientist—is to point out that science, like religion, is imbued with a kind of faith. Why else would he write such a piece.

Gleiser’s second example of “faith” in science is even less convincing: the modern idea of “supersymmetry” in physics, which posits that every particle has a symmetric partner. This would in effect double the number of fundamental particles we know.  It’s a contentious theory, and, according to Gleiser, has divided physicists:

Proposed in the early 1970s, so far no supersymmetric particle has been found. Hopes were high when the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland was turned on a few years back. They found the Higgs boson, but so far no signs of supersymmetry. We wrote about this in April, inspired by an article by physicists Joseph Lykken, from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Maria Spiropulu, from the California Institute of Technology.

Some practitioners are disheartened, but others are confident that this will change next year, when the collider will run with twice the energy. If supersymmetric particles are found then, great: We will enter a new epoch of high-energy physics. But what if they aren’t? My prediction is that there will be a split in the community. While some will abandon the theory for lack of experimental support, others will hold on to it, readjusting the parameters so that supersymmetry becomes viable at energies well beyond our reach. The theory will then be untestable for the foreseeable future, maybe indefinitely. Belief in supersymmetry will then be an article of faith.

But really, can the hunches of these two schools be characterized as “faith”? Faith is strong conviction without strong evidence, but these physicists are simply evincing a tentative conviction in the face of inconclusive evidence. I doubt that any of them would proclaim either supersymmetry or its absence with the strong conviction that William Lane Craig professes the existence of the Christian God.

Now to be sure, Gleiser does add a caveat in about how scientific “faith” differs from religious faith:

There is, however, an essential difference between religious faith and scientific faith: dogma. In science, dogma is untenable. Sooner or later, even the deepest ingrained ideas — if proven wrong — must collapse under the weight of evidence. A scientist who holds on to an incorrect theory or hypothesis makes for a sad figure. In religion, given that evidence is either elusive or irrelevant, faith is always viable.

With this he both undercuts his main point and makes a probably unintended criticism of religion. For if Einstein is a “sad figure” (I refuse to use that characterization about those who take sides on supersymmetry), and we all recognize it, then what’s the damn problem? Why is Gleiser writing this in the first place? What is the sweating professor trying to say? As Gleiser said, when scientists go too far in hanging on to refuted ideas, they’re marginalized.

Second, if Einstein is a sad figure because he maintained belief in determinism against the evidence, then surely religious people who have beliefs supported by no evidence are even sadder figures. But of course Gleiser wouldn’t say that on NPR.

Again, I wonder what prompted the guy to write this piece. It’s almost sensationalistic in its title, but its contents don’t support that title. I see the piece as a mild form of science-dissing, trying to show that science can sometimes be as bad as religion. But Gleiser undercuts even that. Given his caveat, it appears as if Dr. Gleiser has taken up NPR’s blog space saying nothing new, but pretending to make a big point, and, finally, placing himself in the Jonah Lehrer School of Science Can Be Wrong.

Is NPR short on good science journalists? With this piece following close on the heels of the Lombrozo piece that I mentioned yesterday, that seems entirely possible.