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The Rice Thresher
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by J. Cameron Cooper thresher staff
Krauss gave the Physics and Astronomy Department's sixth annual Rorschach Memorial Lecture, "Science, Non-Science and Nonsense: From Aliens to Creationism." The lecture focused on the public's lack of a scientific basis to discard a great deal of the nonsense and pseudo-science that surround them. "There is the view that science is divorced from our culture, that scientific illiteracy is not only acceptable but expected," Krauss said. Krauss is the author of several books, including The Physics of Star Trek and Beyond Star Trek, and serves as the the Physics Department chair at Case Western Reserve University. Krauss' research interest lies in theoretical physics topics including the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics. At the lecture, Krauss said that Carl Sagan, a noted physicist and author, once told him that about half the students in his beginning astronomy class didn't know that the sun was a star. Krauss also quoted a 1996 National Science Foundation survey that found that "about 50 percent of American adults do not know that the Earth orbits the sun and takes a year to do it." Krauss cited both the media and the United States' democratic culture, in which everything is open for debate, as problems. "The media often make separation of sense from nonsense harder," Krauss said, citing an incident in the 1996 presidential campaign in which candidate Pat Buchanan made several controversial statements. Only one went entirely unquestioned by reporters: Buchanan said he was not personally descended from monkeys and did not believe children should be told that. Krauss said other examples of the media influencing the public perception of science are the numerous scientific-sounding programs and reports that influence culture, such as the Fox network's "Alien Autopsy," which he said is "demonstrable nonsense." In his lecture, Krauss also addressed several examples of the failure to apply reason or the scientific method. He explored the history of teaching evolution in America and the conflict that scientific evidence has with theories of creationism, which he called "manifestly false by empirical evidence." Such evidence, he said, shows that the Earth is definitely not 10,000 years old or younger. "The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not," Krauss said. "We are not free to invent the universe as we would like it to be." UFOs are also extremely unlikely, Krauss said, if only for the simple reason that interstellar travel is simply too expensive for aliens to travel to Earth only to perform twisted experiments. He estimated that, even given nuclear fusion, the process that powers stars, a ship would require 7,000 times its weight in fuel in order to travel here at half the speed of light. "I do believe that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe," he said. "I just don't believe it's coming here." Krauss also said the continuing pseudo-scientific interest in crop circles is nonsense, especially because two Englishmen confessed several years ago that they were responsible for most of them. But how do we know what is nonsense, and what is science? "The only authority is experiment," Krauss said. He explained that experiments and evidence are the basis of the scientific method. "Democratic societies depend on an informed populace to make informed decisions," Krauss said. "Who has the authority to deem ideas nonsense? We all do. "If we are unwilling to brand scientific nonsense as just that, no matter whose sensibilities we offend, we begin to blur the truth."
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