Science can make life difficult for manipulators and demagogues. Without science, it would be much easier to convince the public that an intelligent designer created the world, or that greenhouse gas warming and lead contamination are just the fantasies of “alarmists.” To physicist and historian Gerald Holton, attacks on science tend to go along with moves toward authoritarian rule. “History has shown repeatedly that a disaffection with science and its view of the world can turn into a rage that links up with far more sinister movements,” he wrote in his 1993 book “Science and Anti-Science.”
Those who want to fight the conclusions of scientific research often strike at its points of vulnerability — like scientists’ insistence on using the word “theory” to describe even well-established ideas. In popular language, a “theory” implies a hunch or guess –- something less than a fact. That wrongly suggests weakness. “The theory of global warming is just that: a theory,” then-congressman and climate skeptic Mike Pence told an Indiana newspaper in 2003. He probably couldn’t get away with a similar dismissal of germ theory, atomic theory or Einstein’s theory of relativity.
