"James P. Hogan - Kicking the Sacred Cow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

Such high-flying fancy either attains escape velocity and departs from the realities of Earth totally,
or it comes back to ground sometime. My descent from orbit was started by the controversy over
nuclear energy. It wasn't just political activists with causes, and journalists cooking a story who were
telling the public things that the physicists and engineers I knew in the nuclear field insisted were not so.
Other scientists were telling them too. So either scientists were being knowingly dishonest and distorting
facts to promote political views; or they were sincere, but ideology or some other kind of bias affected
what they were willing to accept as fact; or vested interests and professional blinkers were preventing
the people whom I was talking to from seeing things as they were. Whichever way, the ideal of science
as an immutable standard of truth where all parties applied the same rules and would be obliged to agree
on the same conclusion was in trouble.
I quickly discovered that this was so in other fields too. Atmospheric scientists whom I knew
deplored the things being said about ozone holes. Chemists scoffed at the hysteria over carcinogens. A
curious thing I noticed, however, was that specialists quick to denounce the misinformation and
sensationalized reporting concerning their own field would accept uncritically what the same information
sources and media said with regard to other fields. Nuclear engineers exasperated by the scares about
radiation nevertheless believed that lakes formed in some of the most acidic rock on the continent had
been denuded of fish (that had never lived there) by acid rain; climatologists who pointed out that nothing
could be happening to the ozone layer since surface ultraviolet was not increasing signed petitions to ban
DDT; biologists who knew that bird populations had thrived during the DDT years showed up to picket
nuclear plants; and so it went on. Clearly, other factors could outweigh the objective criteria that are
supposed to be capable of deciding a purely scientific question.
Browsing in a library one day, I came across a creationist book arguing that the fossil record
showed the precise opposite of what evolutionary theory predicts. I had never had reason to be anything
but a staunch supporter of Darwinism, since that was all I'd been exposed to, and everyone knew the
creationists were strange anyway. But I checked the book out and took it home, thinking it would be
good for a laugh. Now, I didn't buy their Scriptural account of how it all began, and I still don't. But
contrary to the ridicule and derision that I'd been accustomed to hearing, to my own surprise I found the
evidence that they presented for finding huge problems with the Darwinian theory to be solid and
persuasive. So, such being my bent, I ordered more books from them out of curiosity to look a bit more
deeply into what they have to say. Things got more interesting when I brought my findings up with
various biologists whom I knew. While some would fly into a peculiar mix of apoplexy and fury at the
mere mention of the subject—a distinctly unscientific reaction, it seemed—others would confide
privately that they agreed with a lot of it; but things like pressures of the peer group, the politics of
academia, and simple career considerations meant that they didn't talk about it. I was astonished. This
was the late-twentieth-century West, not sixteenth-century Spain.
Shortly afterward, I met Peter Duesberg, one of the nation's leading molecular biologists, tipped by
many to be in line for a Nobel Prize, suddenly professionally ostracized and defunded for openly
challenging the mainstream dogma on AIDS. What was most disturbing about it after talking with him
and his associates and reading their papers was that what they were saying made sense; the official party
line didn't. Another person I got to know was the late Petr Beckmann, professor emeritus of electrical
engineering, whose electrical interpretation of the phenomena conventionally explained by the Einstein
Relativity Theory (ERT) is equally compatible with all the experimental results obtained to date, simpler
in its assumptions, and more powerful predictively—but it is ignored by the physics community. I talked
to an astrophysicist in NASA who believed that Halton Arp—excommunicated from American
astronomy for presenting evidence contradicting the accepted interpretation of the cosmic redshifts that
the Big Bang theory rests on—was "onto something." But he would never say so in public, nor sign his
name to anything to that effect on paper. His job would be on the line, just as Arp's had been.
Whatever science might be as an ideal, scientists turn out to be as human as anyone else, and they
can be as obstinate as anyone else when comfortable beliefs solidify into dogma. Scientists have emotions
—often expressed passionately, despite the myths—and can be as ingenious as any senator at