Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2007
There I was, minding my own business, which is to poke my nose into other people's business, when I got hoodlinked.
I was researching a Java issue, and my research had led me to the blog of a knowledgeable Java developer, and there I came across a blog entry on a topic that had nothing to do with Java. The Java expert was expressing himself on climate change. I'm not proud of what I did next.
I spent 20 minutes researching the topic so that I could recommend some references that I thought this Java expert ought to know about, and I put it all in a comment on his blog.
Rather than rely on his apparent preferred expert on climate change, some mechanical engineer and part-time journalist for a marginal Canadian newspaper, I suggested helpfully that he might want to see what some publications that actually cover the issue professionally have to say. I prodded him to do a search on the phrase "climate change" at the Scientific American site, for example. And, although Scientific American is universally respected and regularly publishes Nobel Prize winners, I conceded that he might not consider them sufficiently unbiased or authoritative, given his demonstrated high standards, so I offered several alternative science sources, basically every respected science publication I know of. Since I had done that search at every one of their sites, I knew what he'd find if he followed my advice—a devastating renunciation of his views.
In other words, I wallowed in snarkiness. I'm so ashamed.
Seriously. Because it revealed what looked like a contradiction in my values. For one thing, given what I do for a living, who am I to fault anyone for stepping outside his area of expertise?
And in fact, I'm often intrigued when an expert in one field brings a fresh and smart perspective to another, especially when the effect is to challenge orthodoxy and shake things up. I'm drawn to skeptics, and to those brave enough to explore the fringes of science. I'm betting that you feel the same way.
But at the same time, I get really annoyed when an expert in one field seems to think that his expertise should buy him respect in an area he has not researched well and about which he seems to want to talk patent nonsense. I'm betting that you know that feeling, too.
Why is it that we sometimes respect intellectual carpetbagging and sometimes deplore it? What crucial difference provokes two different reactions to the same behavior?
Mulling it over, I thought it would be helpful to compare two Nobel Prize winners in physics who are as famous for their explorations outside their area of expertise as for their prize-winning research.
William Shockley shared the 1956 physics Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for research on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect. Shockley was brilliant, driven, a dazzling problem solver, and may have known the secrets of semiconductors more intimately than anybody else on the planet. His place in semiconductor history was cemented when he returned to his childhood home of Palo Alto and started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories. Shockley Semiconductor, in the Genesis account of Silicon Valley, begat Fairchild, and Fairchild begat Intel, and Intel is still fertile.
But later in life, Shockley said that he hoped to be remembered not for his semiconductor work but for his work in a field outside his area of expertise—eugenics. He became convinced that dark-skinned people were intellectually inferior to light-skinned and pushed for policies and views that most educated people today would find repugnant. His views didn't have such a great reception then, either: He was vilified for them.
Now consider Brian Josephson, who received his physics Nobel Prize in 1973, shared with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, for his discovery of the Josephson Effect in superconductors. Also a brilliant individual with a deep understanding of a highly specialized field.
Today, Josephson devotes much of his time to exploring and promoting research in telepathy, cold fusion, and homeopathy—all pretty clearly outside his area of expertise. But while Josephson has trouble getting a hearing for his ideas, he is not stigmatized in the way Shockley was. Why the difference?
I suspect that it has nothing to do with the merits of their arguments. Every clue I see points to the difference in the emotional baggage of their chosen topics and to their personal styles. I don't get the impression that people dislike Brian Josephson, but Shockley was very hard to get along with.
Do we only like experts to go outside the areas of their expertise when they do so nicely? And if so, what does that say about our scientific objectivity?
Michael Swaine
Editor-at-Large
mike@swaine.com