From Michael Duff, Abdus Salam Professor of Theoretical Physics, Imperial College London
I enjoyed Milena Wazeck’s analysis of the thought processes of those who denied Einstein’s relativity (13 November, p 48). Yet it all sounded eerily familiar.
Phrases such as “when people don’t like what science tells them, they resort to conspiracy theories, mud-slinging and plausible pseudoscience” and “the increasingly mathematical approach of theoretical physics collided with the then widely held view that science is essentially simple mechanics, comprehensible to every educated layperson” call to mind the modern-day ramshackle alliance between unqualified scientists, the blogosphere and many science journalists when confronted with the academic consensus of superstrings and M-theory as the most promising candidates for unifying gravity with the other forces of nature. These people are quick to cry “this is not science”, while themselves resorting to pseudoscientific alternatives.
From Cameron Christie, Douglas, Isle of Man
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In your editorial on the need to win over hearts and minds to rational thinking as opposed to the norm, which seems to be irrational beliefs, you appeal for “the rational case for irrational thinking” (13 November, p 5). Surely this rather misses the point of Milena Wazeck’s article on opposition to Einstein’s theory of relativity, which was that irrationality proved to be more persuasive. Perhaps we should use irrational arguments to win people over to rationality.
From Stephen Wilson, London, UK
Laura Spinney shows that there are other ways of thinking than the modern western norm (13 November, p 42), but the lessons she gives were not learned in the editorial piece “Applied rationality” (p 5). To malign “magical thinking” by assuming it is in opposition to a superior rational approach ignores a great deal of modern science. Magical thinking assumes connection rather than separation, something that has been out of fashion since Descartes but which quantum inseparability has proven.
Magical thinking also assumes that number, of itself, has power to order the way the universe behaves. This may have offended 19th-century mathematicians,but the appearance of such theoretical constructs as the Fibonacci sequence and fractal structures in nature suggests otherwise.
Far from being irrational, magical thinking constantly comes up trumps and is simply a starting point, like rationalism, from which reason and experiment can progress.
