A Vote for Huckabee: Is it really scary?

On a cold January night in Iowa, Mike Huckabee surprised the pundits by handsomely winning the Republican caucuses. His victory was analyzed ad nauseam by the “best political team in the country” and the nugget of wisdom which emerged was that Huckabee had won on the strength of the “evangelical vote.” It didn’t scare anybody in the media, but it did scare many in higher education.

Those who work in institutions of higher learning believe that we are a country at war with ourselves in science education, notwithstanding the fact that scientific advances are what drive the economy. A majority of the evangelical population believes that evolution is not the process by which “we got to where we are” as a species and that creationism also ought to be taught in high schools and colleges. This group recites heavily from scripture and bases its beliefs on concepts that are unverifiable through scientific experiments. If these “scary Huckabee” voters have a say in how public universities and schools are funded, then that becomes a source of worry for many administrators.

It has been widely claimed that public perception of the value of science is terribly lacking, but after Carl Sagan no one has been able to fire up the public’s imagination on scientific endeavors. Is the public’s perception of science and technology really lacking? Have scientists and technologists carved an elitist niche for themselves and ignored the more practical problems of society, thereby fostering “evangelical” beliefs? Let’s take a closer look.

Our tax dollars are funneled through funding agencies for research in science and technology that is supposed to improve the quality of our lives. Over the last three decades there have been virtually no advances in fundamental physics, despite the fact that a lot of federally funded dollars have been poured into research (for more details, please read “The Trouble with Physics” by Prof. Lee Smolin). Smolin argues that string theory makes no new predictions because it comes in an infinite number of versions. Thus, no matter what an experimental result shows, string theory cannot be disproved. But no experiment will ever be able to prove that it is true.

The paradox is succinctly stated by Smolin: “Those string theories we know how to study are known to be wrong. Those we cannot study are thought to exist in such vast numbers that no conceivable experiment could ever disagree with all of them.”

And how did this effort go on for such a long time? A small group of “evangelical physicists,” who utter hymns about “theories of everything,” or “ten-dimensional worlds and worm holes” have succeeded in controlling the purse strings of the federal funding agencies to such an extent that string theorists have turned into a cult, and newcomers with ideas in other areas are forced to work in string theory and publish (or perish if they choose to do something else more valuable and practical for society). The research in this area, which is unverifiable by experiment, would make Galileo and Kepler turn in their graves.

So it is not only the “evangelical Huckabee-ites” who are scary; the “evangelical physicists” are equally scary, if not even more so.

We live in an age where technological advances and the ubiquitous Internet are supposed to “simplify our lives and make us more productive.” These so-called advances do anything but what they are supposed to do in simplifying our lives. I’ll give you just one example; there are several others out there.

Let’s say you purchase a brand new IBM ThinkPad Laptop computer which has built-in hardware to support Bluetooth technology. What is supposed to happen is that you get a Bluetooth compatible headset, pair the headset with the computer, and possibly do a “Restart” to make everything hunky-dory. I guarantee that you will upchuck twice on the way to hell and back before you get this to work successfully on your computer. Try calling the so-called “Customer-Relationship-Management” CRM support line for some help, and they will bob you like a yo-yo before transferring you to a friendly consultant who demands a hefty hourly charge to help you with problems that were not supposed to be there in the first place!

The “evangelical technologists” who design these gizmos and chant mantras like “plug-and-play,” or “interoperability,” or various utterances meant to make things sound simple and easy will have their own scary day in hell to reckon with when the time for redemption arrives.

So who really are the evangelicals that we ought to be scared of: the Huckabee-ites, or the scientists, or the technologists?

I’ll leave you to figure out your own answer. My sensei, the late Mr. Natarajan of IIT Kanpur, would have been no help at all – he would have just replied “Mu,” which basically meant – unask the question.