Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, has sold more than a million copies, completely unheard of for recordings of modern classical music.115 Its popularity comes partly from its simplicity: it’s slow moving, almost like a film score, with none of the harsh atonality of Górecki’s previous works. Despite its eventual incredible sales, its 1977 live premiere apparently didn’t go down well with all audience members. As the final movement closed, with its twenty-one repetitions of an A major chord, Górecki overheard ‘a prominent French musician’ sitting in the front row (most assume it was the irascible avant-gardist Pierre Boulez) hiss ‘Merde!’.116 Even though it’s now recognised as a modern masterpiece, the Third Symphony was just not novel or experimental enough for the musical revolutionaries. Scientists think more like Boulez than Górecki. They’ve taken excitement about novelty in science too far, producing a perverse neophilia where every study needs to be a massive breakthrough that revolutionises the way we think about the world – perhaps announced, as though in the movies, by a scientist in a white lab coat bursting excitedly into the room waving a sheaf of paper. Scientists want their research to sound as though it’s of this Eureka-shouting kind, so they analyse it, write it up, and publicise it accordingly. But although unexpected breakthroughs do occur from time to time, most science is incremental and cumulative, building slowly towards...