We’ve all seen mad scientists in the movies, hair standing on end, shouting, “They laughed! They said I was crazy! But we’ll see who has the last laugh now! Hahahahahahahaha!” Havoc ensues until torch-carrying villagers burn the laboratory.
The real-life counterparts to these fictional mad scientists are the scientists pursuing theories that mainstream science considers, if not crazy, at least too implausible to take seriously.
Sometimes these “mad scientists” are right. Consider meteorologist Alfred Wegener. In 1912, after noticing that the coastlines of Africa and South America fit together as though they were pieces from the same jigsaw puzzle, he suggested the continents had once been joined, but had drifted apart. “Utter nonsense!” said geologists –but today, continental drift is central to our understanding of Earth’s geology.
In an article in the May 20 Washington Post, Robert Ehrlich lists other “crazy” ideas that current “mad scientists” are proposing–such as time travel.
As Einstein pointed out, if you could travel at close to the speed of light, you’d find that time moved slower for you than for the rest of the universe, so that by the time you returned to your starting point, you’d find that while very little time had passed for you, many years had passed at home. You would have traveled into the future.
Traveling into the past is harder. But some “mad scientists” believe that at the smallest subatomic scale, space-time is so distorted that it’s a lot like foam–and like foam, it’s full of little holes, called wormholes, that could link one moment and/or place to another. To travel in time, you just have to find a wormhole leading to the moment you want to visit, pry it open so it’s big enough for you and your time machine, and slip through. Unfortunately, mathematically this feat requires “negative energy,” and nobody knows what that is.
But now Ronald Mallett, a professor of theoretical physics at Connecticut University, thinks he’s found an easier way. To travel in time, you have to bend space-time into a loop that runs from when you are to when you want to visit. According to Mallett’s math, you can achieve this by slowing light down to a crawl (something scientists have recently done). He believes if you circulate one slow-moving beam of light, you can create a vortex of distorted space; if you add a second beam of light moving in the opposite direction, you can cause space and time to switch places, so that moving through time becomes as easy as moving through space. He’s setting up an experiment to test his theory. It could be the first step toward a working time machine–for subatomic particles, at least.
Speaking of subatomic particles, some “mad scientists” believe in tachyons, particles which move faster than the speed of light. In fact, just as ordinary particles can’t be accelerated to past the speed of light, tachyons could never be slowed past the speed of light. Tachyons might give us the ability to send messages back in time–which is one reason most physicists reject them.
Another current “mad scientist” idea is that low levels of radiation are actually good for you. According to physicist Bernard Cohen of the University of Pittsburgh, people living in counties that have above-average amounts of radon (a radioactive gas that seeps from underground) actually have lower-than-average lung-cancer death rates. If low-level radiation is the reason, nuclear waste dumps may become prime real estate!
Thomas Gold (a retired Cornell University space scientist) has the “crazy” idea that the world may have enormously greater reserves of fossil fuels than we currently believe–because, he thinks, fossil fuels aren’t fossil fuels at all; rather than being biological in origin, he believes they were part of the original composition of the planet. He points out that natural gas is found on Earth in places where a biological origin makes no sense, and on Jupiter, which has no life.
Other “mad scientists” believe…well, just about anything you can name. For every apparently well-established theory, you can always find someone with a counter-theory.
Science is never static, and one of the ways it advances is by people putting forward “crazy” theories. Most are, indeed, “utter nonsense”–but some are right, and in the process of testing them, we gain new insights.
Perhaps if those torch-bearing villagers in the movies had understood the scientific process better, they would have left the poor mad scientists alone to get on with their work.
