{"id":29573,"date":"2011-10-10T10:57:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-10T10:57:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-05-14T18:41:53","modified_gmt":"2020-05-14T18:41:53","slug":"4573-free-radicals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/uncategorized\/4573-free-radicals\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cFree Radicals\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nThat’s a strange choice of word, even given his colourful anecdotes of vindictiveness, irresponsibility, rampant self-publicism, ingestion of hallucinogenics, data-massaging or outright fraud. These "anarchists" are still, after all, mainly in the business of looking for law-like connections between things.
\n<\/span>
\nBrooks<\/a> also writes unconvincingly of a historical "cover-up" about scientists’ true (human) nature, and suggests that because revolutionary ideas often come "from nowhere", science must be more "irrational" than we think. Such pop-Paul Feyerabend<\/a> rhetoric risks sensationalising his otherwise fascinating and serious demonstration of how human foibles and creativity are inseparable, and how this fact is not so dangerous after all. <\/p>\n

Now I’m just worried about the "possible space-borne apocalypse" from a massive coronal mass ejection<\/a> by the sun.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Free Radicals<\/i><\/strong>
\nMichael Brooks
\nProfile Books, 2011
\n<\/b><\/span>
\n— By Steven Poole
\n<\/b>
\nhttps:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/
\n<\/a>
\nCopyright © Guardian News & Media, 2011<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this compendium of tales about scientists behaving badly – Galileo ignoring "inconvenient data"; various scientists dismissing good new theories as "buffoonery", "nonsense" or "the most stupid thing that has ever been proposed"; and self-experimenters smoking cigars and kicking each other vigorously in the shins – Michael Brooks (the author of the excellent 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense<\/i>) tries to argue that scientists are really "anarchists".<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":808,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_has_post_settings":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"country":[],"class_list":["post-29573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cFree Radicals\u201d | Dialogue Earth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In this compendium of tales about scientists behaving badly – Galileo ignoring "inconvenient data"; 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