Weird Science: Beyond the Evidence
Unlike those of my colleagues, the sign outside my office door does not tell visitors that I am part of the physics department. Instead, under my name, I have the words “Physics and Weirdness.”
Those who step into my office might not notice anything unusual at first: a mess that resolves into a desk, a computer, papers, books, and a whiteboard with equations and drawings. But if they look closer at my bookshelves, they will find that my books on physics are outnumbered by those about aliens, psychic powers, creationism, and alternative medicine. I have more books that promote distortions of quantum mechanics than books that help me teach quantum mechanics—more that explore beliefs about a hollow earth and UFOs than texts on proper cosmology.
I also have a lot of philosophy of science and skeptical criticisms of fake science mixed in, to lend the bookshelves with weirdness an air of respectability. I often find myself explaining that studying weird and disreputable claims is an excellent way to approach important questions about the nature of science. If I spend half a day reading websites promoting conspiracy theories, well, I have an excuse: I am doing research about the erosion of trust in scientific institutions. While I started out as a normal physicist, nowadays I work on the history and philosophy of science, with an emphasis on weirdness. I am fortunate enough to teach at a university where I can get away with all this. I am doubly fortunate that I regularly teach a course called “Weird Science,” where students debate weird claims and find out that there’s a lot more to science than absorbing the content in the textbooks.
I should add that I find weirdness fascinating. Claims that challenge established science, particularly if they come from outside mainstream institutions, grab my attention. I will even warn colleagues that if I start to get very interested in what they do, it may be because I think it’s weird. If a paranormal or fake scientific claim also has a sizeable popular following, that’s even better. Almost always, I think, the weird claims are implausible: blatantly false, sometimes crazy, at best resident in a kind of gray zone where I can’t yet label them completely wrong but they still seem very fishy. But what we get wrong about how the world works is, I think, as interesting as what we get right. I like to explore what the disreputable fringes of science might tell us about real science.
A few years ago, I had a student in my Weird Science class who came from a Spiritualist family, immersed in the now-fading religious subculture of séances and spirit mediums. She was wonderful to have in the classroom when we were examining claims of psychic powers. But that does not make up a whole semester: we also found our way to discussing creationism and evolution, and my students had to write about what they thought of creationist arguments.
My Spiritualist student turned in a paper describing her childhood experiences with the spirits. Her father was once stationed in Italy, and down in the basement of their building, they saw a vision of a group of Roman soldiers marching by. The floor, however, cut the soldiers off at their knees: they were marching on an old Roman road still buried under the building. And then there was her mother relating a tender memory of watching my student’s grandfather holding her—a few months after he had died.
This was certainly more interesting than a common student paper on creationism, but as I read it, I got increasingly concerned that I’d have to give it a failing grade for being completely off-topic. In her last pages, she described a full-blown séance. Someone in her family got curious and tried to settle the creation-evolution dispute once and for all. They would summon the spirit of Charles Darwin, who, with the benefit of being situated on the Other Side, could lay the matter to rest. The spirit of Darwin appeared and gave an answer in line with Spiritualist doctrine: evolution was correct insofar as it described the progression of how our material bodies came to be, but it was incomplete. Biological evolution needed to be complemented by an account of spiritual evolution to give the full story. And with that evidence, my student declared that the creationists were wrong and the evolutionists partially right.
That was the most unconventional defense of evolution I have ever encountered. A few years later, I started telling the story to my Weird Science class. I usually steer the discussion toward two questions.
First, was my Spiritualist student’s argument scientific? Almost no one who hears the story thinks so. I then ask my students to be more generous in their conception of science. After all, isn’t there more than a hint of empirical investigation in the séance the Spiritualists conducted? Sure, Spiritualist beliefs are full of the miraculous and supernatural, and most of us would be inclined to file them under religion rather than science. But my Spiritualist student was not asking her readers to trust in a tradition or to take a leap of faith. The séance was supposed to be a concrete demonstration producing evidence available to everyone, much like what happens in a science lab.
My students may entertain the possibility that a séance might resemble a scientific experiment, but they invariably think it’s too much of a stretch. Science involves things like math, fancy equipment, and lots of introverted people wearing eyeglasses. Sitting in a darkened room summoning the spirit of Darwin is completely out of place. It just doesn’t fit.
The second question is whether any of this is true. Spiritualists are convinced that communication with the dead is real. They think that spirits can give us reliable information about our world, not just the Other Side. Perhaps séances are too different from lab work, and so it may be useful to maintain a distinction between science and talking with spirits. But whatever the conventions of our language, surely what matters is whether Spiritualists more-or-less have it right. In fact, a main reason we care about whether a practice is scientific is that most of us think that science is a usually reliable process that typically gives us an accurate handle on our world. Once we acknowledge something as science, we also extend our trust. That does not, however, mean that we should only trust science. If séances are not scientific, then maybe Spiritualists need to work a bit harder to convince outsiders, but they still could be correct.
When confronting the question of truth, my students are often torn. On one hand, Spiritualist claims look like religion, and it seems socially abrasive to question religious beliefs. On the other hand, Spiritualism is not mainstream, and my students are predisposed not to accept unfamiliar religious claims. If they’re more secular-minded, students may think that a weird practice such as a séance cannot reliably produce truths. If they’re religious believers, they may think that mainstream science is not capable of properly investigating spiritual realities, but still be suspicious of occult practices. And there are always a few who evade the question by asserting that a claim can be true for some people and not others.
While my students usually have a skeptical initial reaction to Spiritualism, their skepticism is superficial. Both the question of distinguishing science from rivals and pretenders, and the question of how that is relevant to truth, turn out to be a lot knottier than they first might have thought.
One attractive approach to our two questions is to emphasize the process of doing science. Science, we might say, is much more than inert knowledge encased in textbooks. It is a very particular sort of investigation, defined by its method rather than its results. The practice of holding a séance does not comport with the scientific method, and claims like communicating with the spirits of the dead have not been validated through the scientific method.
If we could pin down a scientific method better than the vague secondary-school recipe of inventing a hypothesis, testing it in the lab, refining and rinsing-and-repeating, that would be very useful. A checklist or a set of diagnostic criteria to separate genuine science from pretenders and fakes would have immense practical value. For our health, do we trust mainstream medicine with its invasive procedures and drugs, or alternative practices that seem gentler and more holistic? Do we think that epidemiologists who trace the progress of a pandemic are acting according to the scientific method, or do we suspect that they have been co-opted by governments intent on social control? A good set of diagnostic criteria could help legal systems more easily sort out what was sound scientific expert testimony and what was bunk. An easy-to-use checklist could help us determine what deserves to be part of a common knowledge base, and what are more sectarian articles of faith.
I first came across such diagnostic criteria when I found out about skeptics dedicated to criticism of paranormal and fake scientific claims. Some scientists and philosophers have always worried about the popularity of beliefs such as psychic powers, creationism, and astrology, especially when the weirdness attains media prominence and begins to overshadow mainstream science. In the 1970s, a group of American academics joined forces with a prominent magician or two, who compared what they saw as the dishonest trickery of psychics and Spiritualists with the honest deception of conjuring as entertainment. They formed the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, now CSI), and began publishing a magazine, Skeptical Inquirer. I read the back issues in the library, subscribed, and I have been hooked ever since. There is now an international movement of skeptics combining intellectual criticism of weird claims with a consumer-protection orientation toward enterprises such as alternative medicine.
Naturally, a checklist to separate real from fake science appeals to skeptics. Some of the diagnostic criteria advanced in the early days of CSICOP drew from mid-twentieth-century philosophy of science. The virtues of good science included simplicity; following Occam’s Razor, it was best to have the simplest accounts making the fewest assumptions. In contrast, paranormal enthusiasts were content to either compile lists of The Unexplained or gratuitously invent otherworldly entities to explain spooky experiences. The best science produced repeatable experiments, while psychical research did not. Skeptics compiled a growing list of items to help diagnose whether an idea was good science or a kind of intellectual pathology.
Sometimes fake science directly challenges mainstream science. Religious conservatives in the United States have long wanted to insert what they call “scientific creationism” into public education. This means periodic lawsuits, where a checklist can come to the rescue. Perhaps science is naturalistic in its method: it is limited to investigating natural causes for natural phenomena. After all, how else can we isolate a system and conduct controlled experiments? Creationists claim that a supernatural agent is responsible for the forms of life; therefore, if science is defined by natural explanations, then creationist ideas are automatically out of bounds and cannot be part of public science education. Such diagnostic criteria have contributed to winning lawsuits against creationists.
The most prominent item in the checklist has been falsifiability. Many skeptics and scientists have thought that the possibility of being shown to be false was the distinguishing feature of scientific claims. Scientists need to test their ideas, which means that they take the risk that the results of an experiment will find that their claims are false. In contrast, creation-scientists who assert that the Earth is just thousands of years old, when confronted with the evidence of radiometric dating, make up an excuse. Noah’s Flood, for example, is supposed to have been a supernatural intervention that makes all extrapolations from present physics invalid. Being committed to a religious doctrine, creationists cannot risk admitting that their beliefs are false. According to the falsificationism championed by philosopher Karl Popper, science is about making risky conjectures. Indeed, we should not speak of our best theories as being more or less correct, only that they have so far survived a battery of potentially falsifying tests.
When skeptics and scientists need to distinguish real science from fake science, or just when they need to indicate increasing scientific rigor, they often call on falsifiability. As part of my efforts to permanently postpone growing up, I like to keep an eye on new discoveries about dinosaurs. In one book I was recently reading, the paleontologist wanted to communicate how advanced his science had become in the last decades, so much so that we have accurate scientific knowledge of even the colors of some dinosaurs. He started with a summary of falsificationism, citing Popper’s work in the 1930s, and went on to point out how with today’s improved equipment and field methods, paleontologists can more precisely test ideas rather than rely on informed guesswork.
Criteria such as falsifiability have shaped what has now become a stereotyped rhetoric about how weird claims are excluded by the scientific method. For example, since Bigfoot is supposed to be an unscientific claim, skeptics may be reluctant to say that there is no such animal. Instead, in the pages of a recent Skeptical Inquirer, I read that “millions and thousands of years ago, there was an animal that was Bigfoot-like, but there is no evidence that any similar creature roams the earth today. Under the framework of the scientific method, we are able to disprove those explanations not consistent with evidence. As great as this method is, we cannot disprove the existence of something we have no evidence for, in this case, Bigfoot. We can merely say that there is no evidence to support its existence.” We might have thought it safe to conclude that Bigfoot was not real, but scientific method dictates that “no evidence” is the best verdict we can have. After all, what is unfalsifiable cannot also be known to be false.
In a world full of weird claims and a social media environment awash with conspiracy theories, it will not do just to ask the public to trust science. Skeptics and scientists have to explain why science is trustworthy. Posting a meme or wearing a t-shirt saying “Science: It Works, Bitches” is not enough—why does it work, and what is so special about science? We cannot just rely on the track record of our sciences, since that would use our alleged empirical knowledge to validate our empirical knowledge: a circular argument. We need something stronger than just poking at the world, a secure foundation not subject to the contingency of facts about the world. And our answer very often is the scientific method. When applicable—when investigating natural phenomena—our method certifies that we produce reliable knowledge. Scientists can screw up like anyone else, fudging their data or misusing their instruments, so science is fallible. But there is a logic of figuring out how the natural world works, and this logic is expressed by the scientific method. There is a clear difference between science and weirdness, and checklists of diagnostic criteria pick out the distinctive logical features of scientific reasoning.
I am all for keeping creationism out of schools, studying dinosaurs more rigorously, and preventing public discourse from being derailed by conspiracy theories. If anyone advances such causes by ritual invocations of scientific method, I won’t complain too much. But if we want to use weirdness to learn more about the nature of science, then our checklists and diagnostics are a bit too crude. Sometimes they are even dead wrong.
Let me emphasize again that the philosophy of science adopted by scientists and skeptics mostly comes from the mid-twentieth century—falsificationism, for example, goes back to the 1930s. This is like making an argument that depends on dinosaurs, but taking dinosaurs to be lumbering lizard-like beasts who dragged their tails on the ground, ignoring our more recent scientific picture where dinosaurs are closer to birds, their surviving descendants. In the past decades, historians and sociologists of science have learned a lot more about how science operates, and philosophers of science have similarly made progress. If there is any short summary of their more up-to-date picture of science, however, it is that science is messy and complicated, and that the prospect for finding special logical features that underwrite the advance of science is not good. There are lots of methods that help us learn about the world, and lots of good advice encapsulated in diagnostic checklists, but no scientific method that can guarantee the validity of knowledge in any domain.
The older philosophies favored by scientists and skeptics present a heroic image of science. Armed with the proper methods, scientists wrest knowledge from nature and underwrite the progress of modern times. In much of the twentieth century, the philosophy of science took such a heroic image for granted. But in the 1960s, anti-establishment attitudes caught up with the philosophy of science. Attempts to figure out a logic of science had already run into technical problems and stagnated. Some successors of Popper adopted approaches close to falsificationism, but ended up portraying science as an arbitrary authority. And some philosophers who tried to read the patterns of the history of science ended up suggesting that the overarching conceptual frameworks of science did not and could not change through rational, evidence-based processes. Certainly not all students of science turned hostile toward notions of scientific progress, but the sexy ideas and the Big Names began to be associated with a more cynical view of mainstream science.
In the following decades, as skeptics and scientists continued to worry about public fascination with UFOs and psychics on one hand, and a resurgent conservative religiosity with its creationism and faith-healing on the other, many academics got caught up in what came to be called the Science Wars. The friends of established science faced off against critics embracing the self-devouring postmodernist doubt then fashionable in the humanities, and fireworks ensued. Meanwhile, most of what went on in science studies was far less exciting, building up a more detailed, nuanced understanding of how various sciences operated. But the Science Wars taught skeptics to interpret dissent from a heroic picture of science as a general hostility toward science, and scientists who had occasion to reflect on the nature of science often found it easiest to ignore what was happening on the other side of campus.
It will help to look at some of the reasons why falsificationism has not been a viable philosophy of science for many decades. First of all, unfalsifiability is not, in fact, a feature of weird claims. A statement such as “the Earth is about six thousand years old” is not structurally different from “the Earth is about four and a half billion years old.” Scientists have long had multiple, independent lines of evidence indicating that the time scale for the Earth was much longer than thousands of years; after the advent of modern radiometric dating techniques, age estimates converged on the more precise value that is in today’s textbooks. In this context, young-earth creationism is almost certainly false.
Similarly, there is nothing inherently wrong with claiming that a very large ape inhabits the forests of the Pacific Northwest. It is just very implausible, for reasons very similar to why I can be confident that there is no triceratops living in my back yard. Bigfoot is supposed to be a large animal with a breeding population. Therefore we should have found physical evidence for Bigfoot, but we have not. We have plenty of poor quality evidence: stories of sightings, anatomically suspicious footprint casts, a low-resolution movie of what might be someone in a gorilla suit. None of this is a strong signal for Bigfoot that stands out from the background noise we can expect from hoaxes, perceptual errors, and all the mistakes that can happen in a complex world and uncontrolled environment. We all are fallible and no one is entitled to absolute certainty. Nonetheless, nobody needs to apologize for judging that Bigfoot is very likely a fiction. Certainly no one should adopt the jargon of pronouncing “no evidence” because it seems more scientific.
What, then, about the way that defenders of weirdness often move the goalposts? Yes, creationists may respond that Noah’s Flood reset all clocks, and Bigfoot enthusiasts may turn Bigfoot into an interdimensional being that does not leave the traces a mere large ape would. But these are observations about the evasive behavior of some creationists and Bigfoot supporters—not features of the claims themselves. For that matter, skeptics can easily criticize the refurbished claims. Noah’s Flood should have left all sorts of historical and geological evidence, but it has not. In the context of what we know, it is an absurdity. Piling on even more crazy propositions as qualifiers does not improve the standing of the young-earth claim. Compared to a large ape, a dimension-jumping Bigfoot is an even worse explanation of any concrete evidence, and is as credible as an invisible triceratops in my back yard.
Now, evasive behavior may well be a sign of an intellectual pathology. It can be diagnostic of a community more interested in defending a belief central to its identity than learning about the world. By adjusting peripheral beliefs, the community can protect more important core doctrines. The trouble is, the scientific community similarly adjusts claims in the face of unfavorable experimental results.
Consider the problem of dark matter in cosmology. Astronomers can make good estimates of the mass of luminous matter in what they observe. This is just our ordinary, everyday matter, which interacts through electromagnetic forces and therefore can emit and absorb light. At astronomical distances, however, gravity is the only significant force. And when astronomers measure the speeds of rotation within galaxies and clusters of galaxies, they cannot account for their findings through the gravity of the mass observed.
One possibility is that the measurements are wrong. For example, a recent experiment reported particle speeds faster than light, which would violate our current best understanding of physics. The experimenters suspected a fault, and asked for help to locate it—no easy task, with today’s extremely complicated equipment. Fortunately, they succeeded in identifying a subtle problem with a cable. But this option is not open to astronomers. Since there are so many independent observations using techniques validated in many different situations, it is hard to doubt the rotation-speed data without also questioning our very ability to make astronomical observations.
Another possibility is to suppose that our mass estimates are incomplete. This is where dark matter comes in. Since our instruments can’t detect any light from it, any extra mass in and around the observed galaxies must consist of particles that only interact with ordinary matter through gravity. If we assume that such dark matter exists, we can account for our data, but only if there is a lot more dark matter than ordinary matter, arranged in large, low-density haloes around galaxies. The problem is, there are few other reasons, and certainly no reason from our earthbound knowledge of physics, to cook up dark matter. Without independent evidence for dark matter, it may look like astrophysicists have invented something new, exotic, and invisible, just to avoid acknowledging failure.
Finally, our theory of gravity might be wrong. Some astrophysicists have tried to explain the data with modified theories of gravity, but their proposed changes also have little independent motivation other than to fit the puzzling data. Moreover, their approach has a hard time accounting for both the galaxy and the galaxy-cluster data, so the dark matter conjecture is by far the leading contender in the astrophysical community. Still, modifying the theory is an option.
In such situations, speaking of falsification is not useful. The theory does not fit the data, but what has been falsified? The experimental procedure? Boundary conditions such as claims about the amount of mass present? The underlying theory? And the next steps in trying to understand the data often look like the scientific community is trying to protect core ideas by just making up new stuff.
Skeptics and scientists are already convinced that there is something wrong with creationism or Bigfoot before they ever adopt the rhetoric of falsifiability to suggest that there is a sharp difference between real science and pretenders. Whatever the difference may be, falsificationism does not pick it out.
What, then, of the checklists and diagnostic criteria that are supposed to distinguish fake science from the real thing? After all, we still need practical ways to figure out what knowledge claims to trust. Most of the checklists and criteria are probably still sound, as long as we understand them to be rules of thumb, rather than strict requirements. Simpler explanations are more promising, but simplicity is not a judgment we can make independent of our background knowledge. Natural explanations are better than supernatural scenarios, but mostly because modern science has a history of successfully replacing supernatural claims, such as demon possession, with natural alternatives. There is a virtue in testing theories and being open to failure, even if falsificationism is a dead end. Claims that raise alarms on a diagnostic checklist are not necessarily pathological, but they do not deserve our full trust, even if the symptoms turn out to be due to nothing worse than incomplete knowledge.
This essay is excerpted from Weirdness!: What Fake Science and the Paranormal Tell Us about the Nature of Science, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Taner Edis is a professor of physics at Truman State University. His primary research has been in the history and philosophy of science, addressing questions raised by popular beliefs in fake science and the paranormal. He has authored and co-edited many books, including Why Intelligent Design Fails and The Ghost in the Universe. He lives in Kirksville, Missouri.
August 2024