It’s been a good week for internet karma. Michael Mann, the promoter of the climate science “hockey stick”, who was ordered to pay $1 million in damages last year for his bogus lawsuits against critics, has now been forced out of his cushy job at Penn State. It seems he could not help posting stupid, hateful things about Charlie Kirk.
The long arm of intellectual justice also caught up with celebrity scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, as well. It seems that the decades of fabrications and hoaxes this guy has promoted finally got noticed and he and Wikipedia are furiously deleting all the garbage he has produced over the years.
If you haven’t followed Neil, he has a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but his career is in the media and administration. As such, he became a gruesome combination of Carl Sagan -- trendy purveyor of junk science -- and Christopher Hitchens -- anti-religious ignoramus.
But you can still find lots stupid things Tyson has said over the years, like his wildly dishonest misquote of George W. Bush. That shows up again in one of his rants in this video.
If you go to the 16.05 mark in this lecture, you even get my all-time favorite Tyson idiocy. He says that St. Augustine wrote a book called the “Cities” of God and it contains instructions for burning witches!
Actually, there is nothing at all about punishing witches in The City of God and St. Augustine of Hippo was famous for denying that witches and other occultists have any actual magic power but were just delusional people.
Obviously, Neil never read the book, which is one of the most important works of western civilization, but he would hate it, if he did. St. Augustine makes the case for limited government as on earth, man is not perfectible and government cannot change that.
Of course, not-so-talented scientists making up stuff to get on TV is nothing new. You may remember Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb) pushing the “Nuclear Winter” theory in the 1980s and demanding that we essentially surrender to the Soviets to save the planet. But then Sagan made the mistake of giving out actual predictions based on his “research” -- the Kuwait Oil fires that were supposed to cause doomsday.
Sometimes legitimate scientists can’t help themselves, either. Steven Hawking, through savvy marketing and maybe taking too much credit from his great rival, Jacob Bekenstein, became the most well-known physicist of our time. Venturing out of his field though, usually proved deeply embarrassing. Needing to sell books, or just not understanding freshman-level philosophy, he even mangled up a speech he heard from St. John Paul II on a most fitting subject -- the limits of natural science in examining transcendent questions.
Coming out of WWII with so many successes from jet aircraft to nuclear power to transistors to the polio vaccine, Big Science was in its heyday. Being human, lots of scientists, even very good ones, convinced themselves they had the answers for everything, and many in the general public were happy to go along.
The Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling is a great example. His chemical research led to the modern exploration of DNA and all that entails. Yet, the second half of his life was wasted on Soviet appeasement politics and ridiculous claims for the power of Vitamin C.
But over the decades, scientific bullies and blowhards have managed to discredit the automatic authority Big Science had assumed for itself in the post-war era.
As we now live in the Internet Age, we can search out what the experts and policymakers have been saying all along and discover their truth and falsity. That’s no fun for characters like Neil Tyson or Anthony Fauci, who truly needed his preemptive pardon. But in the end a very good thing for the rest of us. Real science can only be done in a spirit of honesty and humility, and knowing the very narrow limits of one’s expertise. Something often missing from the celebrity scientists of our world until now.
Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.
Image: AT via Magic Studio