Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University
Friday, 31 March 2017 at 15:00 in the Large Operon, EMBL Heidelberg
Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University
The problem with pseudoscience
Abstract
This presentation explores the unresolved “demarcation problem” — that is, how to determine the boundary between “science” and pseudoscience” — from a historical perspective. After offering a taxonomy of the different categories of doctrines that have been tagged with the label over several centuries, the talk will focus on two specific instances in which the demarcation problem has become intertwined with debates over the professionalization of science, with divergent results: the rise and fall in popularity of the cosmic catastrophism of Immanuel Velikovsky; and contemporary controversies over “denialism,” often associated with antiregulatory policy positions.
Biography
Michael D. Gordin is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences and Russian, European, and American history. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2001, and served a term at the Harvard Society of Fellows before moving to Princeton. He has co-edited several volumes and published articles on a variety of topics, such as the introduction of science into Russia in the early 18th century, the history of biological warfare in the late Soviet period, the relations between Russian literature and science, as well as a series of studies on the life and chemistry of Dmitrii I. Mendeleev, formulator of the periodic system of chemical elements. His first book is a cultural history of Mendeleev in the context of Imperial St. Petersburg, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (Basic Books, 2004). He has also worked extensively in the early history of nuclear weapons, and is the author of Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton, 2007), a history of the atomic bombings of Japan during World War II, and an international history of nuclear intelligence, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (FSG, 2009). In 2012, University of Chicago Press published his history of the controversies surrounding the boundary between science and pseudoscience focusing on the career of Immanuel Velikovsky, entitled The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, and in 2013, the press also released How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, which he co-authored with Lorraine Daston, Paul Erickson, Thomas Sturm, Rebecca Lemov, and Judy Klein. His most recent book, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English, a history of modern science from the point of view of the languages in which science has been conducted, was published by University of Chicago Press and Profile Books in Spring 2015.