Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
highly productive fields, such behaviour is almost the norm.
I think all that social turmoil and human weakness aids the
enterprise of science. There is an established framework in which
any scientist can prove another wrong and make sure everyone
else knows about it. Even when our motives are base, we keep
stumbling on something new.
The American chemistry Nobel laureate Harold C. Urey once
confided to me that as he got older (he was then in his seventies),
he experienced increasingly concerted efforts to prove him wrong.
He described it as 'the fastest gun in the West' syndrome: the
young man who could outdraw the celebrated old gunslinger
would inherit his reputation and the respect paid to him. It was
annoying, he grumbled, but it did help direct the young whippersnappers
into important areas of research that they would never
have entered on their own.
Being human, scientists also sometimes engage in observational
selection: they like to remember those cases when they've been
right and forget when they've been wrong. But in many instances,
what is 'wrong' is partly right, or stimulates others to find out
what's right. One of the most productive astrophysicists of our
time has been Fred Hoyle, responsible for monumental contributions
to our understanding of the evolution of stars, the synthesis
of the chemical elements, cosmology and much else. Sometimes
he's succeeded by being right before anyone else even understood
that there was something that needed explaining. Sometimes he's
succeeded by being wrong - by being so provocative, by suggesting
such outrageous alternatives that the observers and experimentalists
feel obliged to check it out. The impassioned and
concerted effort to 'prove Fred wrong' has sometimes failed and
sometimes succeeded. In almost every case, it has pushed forward
the frontiers of knowledge. Even Hoyle at his most outrageous -
for example, proposing that the influenza and HIV viruses are
dropped down on Earth from comets, and that interstellar dust
grains are bacteria - has led to significant advances in knowledge
(although turning up nothing to support those particular notions.)
It might be useful for scientists now and again to list some of their
mistakes. It might play an instructive role in illuminating and
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