Human Folly Marches On[ldots]But So Does Science - Editorial

What do meowing-and-biting nuns, the Salem witch trials, the Leeds message-on-hens-eggs end-of-world terror, the New York Sun life-on-the-Moon hoax, the Banda Island head-hunting rumor-panic, the Seattle windshield-pitting epidemic, the 1947 flying saucer wave, the West Bank psychogenic symptoms episode, and the Nigerian vanishing-genitalia fear have in common? They are all examples of collective delusions or mass hysterias that reached some degree of prominence at different times over the past millenium.

In this issue, sociologists Robert E. Bartholomew and Erich Goode survey some of the more colorful mass delusions and hysterias from the past thousand years of human folly. This is a rich field for sociologists, and Bartholomew and Goode study such episodes in detail. But here they just let the bare facts speak for themselves. People being what we are, one thing is clear. As the authors says: "The next one thousand years will yield a new batch of social delusions and hysterical outbreaks that will reflect the hopes and fears of future generations."

This issue contains three different easy-to-read tutorials on three exciting and fertile areas of science. Physicist Thomas D. Gutierrez clearly summarizes the experiments to begin and day now at the Relativistic heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven, on Long Island. This accelerator will collide two gold nuclei head-on at 99.995 percent of the speed of light, briefly creating, it is hoped, a quark-gluon plasma similar to what the universe consisted of a millionth of a second or so after the Big Bang. Martin Gardner provides one of the clearest expositions I have read about David Bohm's neglected "guided wave theory," which shows us a way to understand and explain some of the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. And neuroscientist Kyle Kirkland provides a fine overview of some of the new understanding in neuroscience, the study of the brain.

Kirkland does so in raising an interesting question: Why is their no fringe-science counterpart of neuroscience, why no paraneuroscience? The reasons show why the understanding of brain function achieved through neuroscience has been so fruitful. The Gutierrez article also has a purpose special to SI--to show how scientists addressed public concerns about the experiments, concerns alleging apocalyptic possibilities raised in several misleading and sensational media reports (the majority of media coverage was highly responsible). Gutierrez shows how the real science negates these concerns, but also how the RHIC scientists took the public concerns seriously and addressed them straightforwardly. This may be a success story.

In the meantime, if, like me, you enjoy good, imaginative hard-science science fiction, I recommend physicist Gregory Benford's 1999 novel Cosm, which centers on experiments at RHIC much like those planned. In the course of it he portrays science as it really works better than most nonfiction works do.

Speaking of science fiction writers, I review in this Arthur C. Clarke's collected essays. Rereading his writings from the 1940s on about space flight, I was struck by an unstated poignancy: how quickly we got to the Moon, probably sooner than Clarke and fellow visionaries expected; yet how little we have done since. No manned missions have gone beyond Earth orbit since 1972. I understand the reasons, but still, it's a shame.

Kendrick Frazier

COPYRIGHT 2000 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
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