Nine Crazy Ideas in Science

doom writes "The general concept of Robert Ehrlich's book is absolutely superb: Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True. Here, someone with a technical background (Ehrlich is a physics prof at George Mason) and an open mind investigates in detail a number of 'crazy' ideas, to see if there's anything to them. The execution of the idea is not quite as superb, but Robert Ehrlich has done better at this difficult job than anyone else I know of. This book is highly recommend as a good review of the evidence on some scientific controversies." Read on for doom's review, in which he goes through Erlich's nine-part list, but mind the spoilers. Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True author Robert Ehrlich pages 244 publisher Princeton University Press rating Great idea, very good execution reviewer doom ISBN 0691070016 summary A scientist evaluates some "crazy ideas"

Here's the deck of nine ideas under consideration:

• More Guns Mean Less Crime
• AIDS is Not Caused by HIV
• Sun Exposure is Beneficial
• Low Doses of Nuclear Radiation Are Beneficial
• The Solar System Has Two Suns
• Oil, Coal, and Gas Have Abiogenic Origins
• Time Travel is Possible
• Faster-than-Light Particles Exist
• There Was No Big Bang

The game here is that Ehrlich is not telling you in advance what his conclusions were. He says he's tried to keep an open mind, and claims that during his investigations he actually changed his mind about some things (though he never says about what exactly).

So in this review I'm going to give you generalities first, and bury "the butler did it" type information after a SPOILER warning.

One of the problems with the execution of this work is that you can pretty often tell when Ehrlich is enthusiastic about an idea just from his general tone as he writes about it... and conversely, in retrospect I think I should've been able to spot when he disagreed with, because the writing in those chapters was a little confusing.

Part of his schtick is that at the end of each chapter he rates the idea on a scale of 0 to 4 "cuckoos". Oddly enough I often find that I strongly disagree with his cuckoo ratings even just based on the evidence that he presents. But the absolute magnitude of my disagreements are typically no more than a single "cuckoo".

I was worried about some of his evaluation criteria (see the introduction available on-line as a sample chapter), because he includes several points that strike me as fairly dicey: "Who proposed the idea?"; "How attached is the proposer to the idea?" and "Does the proposer have an agenda?" These all relate to judging the person rather than the idea itself. (Consider that "consider the source" and "ad hominem argument" are pretty much the same as far as logic goes.) But he does clearly understand that these are just rules of thumb, and I note with some amusement that he doesn't resort to these particular rules anywhere in the later chapters. He's more interested in the logic of the arguments, which is as it should be.

I could bring up lots of quibbles (and I probably will after the spoiler warning), but overall I found this to be a great breezy read. I learned quite a bit from it. While nothing here made me do a reversal of my beliefs, I was often surprised that the evidence for something was stronger or weaker than I'd supposed.

Here we have an educated, astute, person doing a relatively independent review of some controversial, interesting technical subjects. Why aren't there more books like this?

Ah, but at least there's one more! I see that a sequel has just come out: Eight Preposterous Propositions: From the Genetics of Homosexuality to the Benefits of Global Warming . I bet I'll be submitting a review on that one shortly ...

Anyway, now into the nitty gritty. Here's your SPOILER WARNING. Skip the following if you want to play the "guess where he's going" game with this book. Let's take it chapter by chapter:

More Guns Mean Less Crime

I'm a "right to bear arms" kind of guy myself, and I was surprised that the data doesn't seem to support private ownership of guns as a crime deterrent. Ehrlich argues persuasively that the statistical evidence for this is very weak. I appreciate the fact that Ehrlich concludes that both the pro and anti gun sides are nuts: he rates them 3 and 2 "cuckoos" respectively, where a 3 is "almost certainly not true" and 2 is "very likely not true."

But here, we come to my first strong disagreement with him. If the effects aren't strong enough to measure, why the asymmetry in the "cuckoo" rating for the pro and anti side? I might rate them both at a 2 myself.

AIDS is Not Caused by HIV

I've had the impression that the the Duesberg hypothesis was pretty screwy, but I was willing to tentatively consider it might have something of value. For example, what about the possibility that multiple diseases are now being diagnosed incorrectly as one single syndrome "HIV"?

But Ehrlich's analysis satisfies me that there's not much of scientific value in Duesberg's ideas at all. I don't argue with his 3 cuckoo rating (but I wouldn't blame you if you thought it deserved the full 4).

Sun Exposure is Beneficial

Ehrlich concludes that this looks fairly plausible, and gives it a 0 cuckoo rating, pretty much as I would have expected. Many people might find this surprising though, certainly the popular impression these days seems to be that sunlight is deadly.

Low Doses of Nuclear Radiation Are Beneficial

Here, Ehrlich lays out the case for "radiation hormesis", and I really don't think this is that fantastic a notion (the difference between a poison and a medicine is often a matter of dosage, why wouldn't this be true of radiation?). But radiation is so demonized in the popular imagination that "radiation is good for you" comes off an insane joke. Ehrlich takes it seriously, and essentially concludes that while there are reasons for suspecting that this effect exists, it hasn't been entirely established. And here we have one of my quibbles: he awards it 1 cuckoo, which translates to "probably not true, but who knows". But there is no reason for saying it's probably not true. If something is not crazy, just not established, I would be inclined to award it "0 cuckoos," aka "Why not?"

The Solar System Has Two Suns

This is the "Nemesis" hypothesis, which it will probably come as no surprise is rated at 2 cuckoos. The short version of the story: originally they looked at part of the extinction record, and it looked like there was a definite cycle. But if you look at the whole record it doesn't seem to be there.

Oil, Coal, and Gas Have Abiogenic Origins

This is subject that's been of some interest to me, ever since I heard Thomas Gold give a talk on this idea about a decade ago. It turns out that this is now looking much less like "an intriguing possibility" and much more like a truth awaiting a few funerals before it will be declared established. The odds are good that "fossil fuels" don't actually come from fossils, rather they're from hydrocarbons that pre-existed the formation of the earth, which means we're probably not going to run out of them. (So that means we can ignore those environmental wackos, right? Nope: imagine what happens to the atmosphere if we keep ramping up the rate at which we burn this stuff.)

Ehrlich rates this at 0 cuckoos, but maybe he should have invented a "-1 cuckoo" for this one.

Time Travel is Possible

2 cuckoos: no surprises.

Faster-than-Light Particles Exist

Ehrlich mentions in his introduction in the interests of "full disclosure" that he's actually strongly attached to one of the ideas discussed here (the existence of tachyons), but by the time I'd gotten to that chapter I'd entirely forgotten about this, and I was disappointed to realize that he was being an advocate, not an independent reviewer (it includes a picture of him wearing a "no tardy-centrism" T-shirt).

Ehrlich rates this at 0 cuckoos, but come on. Even just based on the write-up he presents, it's a clear 1 cuckoo.

There Was No Big Bang

Clocks in at 3 cuckoos, as you might expect.

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Comments

Re:more reviews of this book

[FuzzyDaddy]

My Five Cents

Geez, I only stick my two cents in... damn rich people.

Re:more reviews of this book

[gantzm]

Ahhh, so maybe guns don't *cause* crime, maybe packing people too tightly into cities causes crime.

Re:more reviews of this book

[Chilliwilli]

*quip* by anti-gun nuts do you mean foreigners?