Asimov’s Corollary

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of Isaac Asimov. I decided on a career in science in large part from reading Asimov’s books. As a teenager I particularly enjoyed his collections of essays from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He wrote an essay there each month about science: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, medicine, and even mathematics. Every time he collected seventeen essays, he would publish them in a book. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I came to be a coauthor on Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology largely because of the influence those essay collections had on me when I was young.

Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright, by Isaac Asimov.

This week I want to look at one of those essays that is especially germane today. It appears as the final chapter in the book Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright. The essay is titled “Asimov’s Corollary,” and was first published in the February, 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Now, almost fifty years later, it seems more relevant than ever.  I urge you to get a copy and read it in its entirety. I will quote parts that I think are especially important. 

To help set the stage, let me note a few things.

• When Asimov mentions “Arthur” he is talking about Arthur C. Clarke, his fellow science fiction writer and good buddy. Along with Robert Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke are considered the “Big Three” in science fiction.
• Asimov loved to talk about himself. You might at first think he’s egotistical, but once you’ve read enough of his works you will realize it’s all a big act…sort of. It is one of the reasons I loved to read his essays.
• By today’s standards Asimov and Clarke sound a bit sexist, assuming all scientists are men. This is, in part, a sign of the times when they lived. I won’t defend their sexism, but I’ll forgive them because of all the good they did and all they taught me.

Asimov writes:

In Arthur’s book Profiles of the Future (Harper & Row, 1962) he advances what he himself calls “Clarke’s Law.” It goes as follows:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong…

…Naturally when I read a paragraph like that, knowing Arthur as I do, I begin to wonder if, among all the others, he is thinking of me…

Asimov was an elderly scientist at that time, and was fond of making all sorts of predictions, many of which claimed something was impossible.

Doesn’t Clarke’s Law make me uneasy, then? Don’t I feel as though I am sure to be quoted extensively, and with derision, in some book written a century hence by some successor to Arthur?

No, I don’t. Although I accept Clarke’s Law and think Arthur is right in his suspicion that the forward-looking pioneers of today are the backward-yearning conservatives of tomorrow, I have no worries about myself. I am very selective about the scientific heresies I denounce, for I am guided by what I call Asimov’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law. Here is Asimov’s Corollary:

When, however, the lay public rallies around an idea that is denounced by elderly but distinguished scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion—the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.

But why should this be?… Human beings have the habit (a bad one, perhaps, but an unavoidable one) of being human; which is to say that they believe in that which comforts them…

Asimov then examines a few cases of people believing things without evidence. He concludes

Then why do people believe? Because they want to. Because the mass desire to believe creates a social pressure that is difficult (and, in most times and places, dangerous) to face down. Because few people have had the chance of being educated into the understanding of what is meant by evidence or into the techniques of arguing rationally.

But mostly because they want to…

When I read this, I think of people claiming (falsely, we know from the evidence) that vaccines cause autism; I think of people claiming (again, falsely) that cell phone radiation causes cancer; and I think of people claiming (still again, falsely) that climate change is a hoax. When I hear these assertions, made passionately and vehemently but with no evidence provided, I think that the elderly scientists (what I would call “the scientific consensus”) is right after all. And while Asimov writes “probably,” I would write “almost certainly.”

I miss you, Isaac Asimov. We need you now more than ever.

There is a cult of ignorance. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTV1iQyjFFU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIB1b_8hqB0