There was a time when science was seen as the domain of the nerdy few.

When the topic of careers comes up at social gatherings and people learn that I’m a scientist, the response has been, ‘Oh! I was no good at chemistry at school…’ As though I thought it mattered. After this, the discussion moves to other areas.

In other words, people used to think nothing of professing their ignorance of the profession. It’s a fairly common phenomenon. The problem with the public political discourse today may be summed up this way – the politicians have become scientists, and the scientists have become politicians.

The outworking of this is that politicians are pronouncing ‘the science is settled’ and scientists are producing results in line with the political pronouncements, thus ensuring their ongoing funding.

If people remained at liberty to disagree with these pronouncements, then at least the possibility could exist of errors being overturned regardless of political consequence.

Instead, we face the likelihood of a dystopian ‘Ministry of Truth’ controlling what we can and cannot say, it behoves us to consider several significant instances when mainstream has been spectacularly and wholly wrong.

But first let’s take a trip into the mind of a scientist – a real one.

Sir Isaac Newton once likened himself to a child playing by the seaside:

‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’

This pithy quote encapsulates the soul of scientific endeavour. No matter how qualified we may be, or what we may have achieved in our career, we see our knowledge as minuscule compared to the vast ocean of knowledge that surrounds us.

We are perpetually, endlessly, and unapologetically curious, with a child-like fascination of the physical world.

We also love being proved wrong. We love it when we come across information that debunks our knowledge in a particular area. Why? Because, by definition, we have learnt something. Thus, the notion of any branch of science being ‘settled’ in the sense of being beyond scrutiny, is a concept that is foreign to the scientist.

How then did we end up with settled science?

To answer this, we must consider how these conclusions are arrived at.

There are essentially three mechanisms:

Argument by authority, argument by evidence, or a combination of these two.

To understand this, let’s consider how the three mechanisms may work when buying a car.

In the first case, we seek information from the car’s mechanic on the condition of the car. We book an inspection by a relevant motoring authority. We research online reviews of the type of car that it is, the extent to which it meets our requirements, what running costs and any maintenance issues may be, and so on. But we never drive the car ourselves. Our decision on whether to buy it is based solely on the opinion of others.

In the second case, we inspect the car, drive it, and view the maintenance records. We conduct a fuel consumption test ourselves, and inspect the engine and mechanical components. We then take the car for a drive and arrive at our own conclusions about its suitability for our needs.

Of course, in the real world, it’s hard to conceive of anyone taking either of these two approaches, and the vast majority take the third approach – a combination of ‘argument by authority’ and ‘argument by evidence’. We’d seek external opinions about the car, but also check it out ourselves.

There are two professions in which people operate exclusively by one of the first two mechanisms – either ‘argument by authority’ or ‘argument by evidence’ to the exclusion of all else. I refer to, respectively, lawyers and scientists.

With lawyers, precedent is everything. If a case arises, the lawyers scour the records for a similar case. If they find one, the outcome of that case is quoted as gospel truth, and no further discussion is entered into in the present case.

When it comes to scientists, precedent is nothing. No scientist would have any qualms about saying, ‘I am right and the rest of the world is wrong. Here is the evidence.’

The problem is that most politicians are lawyers.

When a prominent ‘climate scientist’ pronounces the existence of a ‘climate crisis’ their default position is that as an authoritative figure, he must be right. Their mind is unable to demand evidence or consider other possibilities.

There are many cases where science has been spectacularly wrong, and all branches of science (including both meteorology and medicine) are open to scrutiny.

The Phlogiston theory, like all scientific theories, made sense at the time. Proposed in 1668 by J.J.Becher, it sought to explain the combustion process. As this predated Dalton’s atomic theory by over 100 years, no one had any concept of chemical transformations or molecular processes in the modern sense of the term. In the absence of these, they simply observed that when wood burned, its mass diminished – a stout log was now a pile of ashes. Therefore, it had lost something. This material was referred to as phlogiston.

Over the next 100 years or so, this theory was used to explain various phenomena. It was observed, for example, that when something was burned in an enclosed vessel, after a while combustion ceased. The explanation for this seemed straightforward. The air had become fully phlogisticated, and no more could therefore be absorbed.

Cracks began to appear in the theory when it was observed that some things became heavier when they burned, like metals (such as magnesium). The explanations for phenomena such as this steadily became more complex, with people such as Robert Boyle (of Boyle’s Law fame) proposing that it could have negative mass. Others suggested it had ‘levity’ – it was lighter than air.

Eventually, late in the 18th Century, the theory was overturned as a result of elegant quantitative studies by Antoine Lavoisier (with some help from Joseph Priestley) who eventually discovered oxygen and described its role in combustion. Tragically, not long after this Lavoisier lost his head in the French Revolution, largely for the crime of being of noble birth.

The Luminiferous Ether theory came about as the result of observation. Suppose you have an old-fashioned alarm clock under an inverted glass bell. When the alarm sounds, you can both hear it, and see the hammer striking the bells. We now use a pump to draw a vacuum inside the glass bell and repeat the process. The sound disappears, but we can still see the hammer striking the bells.

By the late 17th Century it was understood that both sound and light had wave nature. Waves required a medium to propagate through for example, sound required air, and thus the sound could not propagate in a vacuum. Light, however, can visibly propagate through a vacuum, so it was deduced that there must be some other medium present. The luminiferous ether (or aether) was postulated in about 1690.

As early as 1704, Newton understood that light also had particle nature, but the connection between these two was never fully characterised until the photoelectric effect was discovered in 1887.

As it happens, the luminiferous ether theory was accepted as mainstream knowledge for about 200 years. I cannot find a single instance of someone disputing its existence. When it was finally disproved (also in 1887) it was entirely by accident.

In perhaps the most spectacular example of a single experiment completely disproving a well-accepted theory, Michelson and Morley attempted to measure the luminiferous ether. Their experiment proved, conclusively, that there was nothing to measure. So unexpected was this outcome that it took a little while for the implications of their experiment to be realised. But when Hertz characterised the photoelectric effect in the same year, the luminiferous ether theory was assigned to the dustbin of history.

Then there was Ludwig Boltzmann. At about the same time that the photoelectric effect was being described, Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian professor of physics, was revolutionising the understanding of matter by suggesting that electrons existed in discrete energy levels.

This brought him into conflict with many physicists, who did not accept Dalton’s atomic theory, and refused to accept the notion of matter being composed of tiny, discrete particles. Atomic theory, at best, was a theoretical construct upon which matter could be described in energetic terms.

Boltzmann’s ideas entailing discrete subatomic particles with discrete energy levels were anathema to this establishment, and he was heavily criticised by people such as Ernst Mack. Tragically, he took his own life in 1906, and it was two years later, when a colloidal suspension was first characterised, that the notion of tiny particles – atoms – was finally proven.

There is no higher honour that can be bestowed upon a scientist than having a law or constant named after you, and Boltzmann’s place in the annals of science was finally enshrined with the Boltzmann Constant.

The normal objection to instances like this is that it’s ancient history. That was back when people were still working things out. Now we are in the modern age, where we understand stuff.

What people who say this don’t understand is that every generation is modern in its own time. Boyle, for example, accepted the phlogiston theory simply because that’s what he believed the evidence was telling him. No one can accuse the creator of one of the foundational laws of chemistry of naivety – he was a man of his time, interpreting scientific phenomena with the tools available to him.

Thus it is easy to imagine the existence of smug, self-righteous individuals in any generation who are certain that they are right. Look no further than the castigation of Boltzmann to see this in action.

And so it is today. Whether it be Peter Ridd, or Richard Lindzen, those that go against the orthodoxy may expect little mercy from the settled science mob.

Get 10 issues for just $10

Subscribe to The Spectator Australia today for the next 10 magazine issues, plus full online access, for just $10.

SUBSCRIBE 10 issues for $10 REGISTER 3 articles a month

Already a subscriber? Log in