You’ve heard, I hope, about NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who the Bush administration tried to silence when he called for reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases. Cosmology, as it turns out, is not exempt from the radical anti-science agenda. The New York Times, via Atrios:
In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.
…
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose resume says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.
In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”
It continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”
Emphasis added. Draw your own conclusions, I’m feeling a bit of outrage fatigue at the moment.
Update: Phil Plait has extensive comments at Bad Astronomy Blog. Also Pharyngula, Balloon Juice, Stranger Fruit, Gary Farber, Mark Kleiman, World O’ Crap, and Hullabaloo.
Update again, for our new visitors: Folks, of course the Big Bang model is a theory, and of course it is also correct. It has been tested beyond reasonable doubt: our current universe expanded from a hot, dense, smooth state about 14 billion years ago. The evidence is overwhelming, and we have hard data (from primordial nucleosynthesis) that the model was correct as early as one minute after the initial singularity.
Of course the initial singularity (the `Bang’ itself) is not understood, and there are plenty of other loose ends. But the basic framework — expanding from an early hot, dense, smooth state — is beyond reasonable dispute.
It’s too bad that scientific education in this country is so poor that many people don’t understand what is meant by “theory” or “model.” It doesn’t mean “just someone’s opinion.” Theories can be completely speculative, absolutely well-established, or just plain wrong; the Big Bang model is absolutely well-established.
Maybe it’s all just a last ditch battle; maybe they know that reason has won the war, and only in desperation do they lash out like this. Of course, like in any battle, one still has to fight, and it is wearisome.
Need another reason for outrage?
IDers claim they are ideological heirs to Galileo
Yes, that Galileo. Galileo Galilei. Guy with the telescope and the heliocentrism. Punished by the Vatican.
*sigh*
So they might recant?
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
35. # 40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.
Nothing new under the sun.
I sometimes wish the Bush administrations was “just a theory”
Sean, the link to the nytimes story is dead. The correct link is this one.
Pingback: Pharyngula
damtp_dweller, thanks; should be fixed now. (I link to the RSS feed, which doesn’t eventually go behind a firewall like the regular stories; see the NYT Link Generator.)
To be honest, I’m kind of astonished this is the first official statement about the Big Bang. The target of the theocrats is always Origins, be it of humanity, life, biological complexity, whatever. What more profound materialistic account of Origins is there than the very successful description of the creation of the Universe itself? Really, how coult it not be a bone of contention among creationists?
Maybe that spike in physics funding is supposed to be hush money?
As indicated in the NYT article, and emphasized by Phil Plait in his blog, there is a real possibility that this guy simply overstepped the mark. He is, after all, fresh out of college and presumably inexperienced, so this may not be a case of the ID crowd infiltrating NASA.
On the other hand, that begs the question of how somebody so obviously clueless could have gotten a relatively powerful job.
dampt_dweller said:
Can you say “Michael Brown, former head of FEMA”?
Touché. 🙂
That should of course have been ‘Touché’.
Ugh… It got even worse when I checked out the top google result for a search for “NASA Big Bang”.
Choice quote:
“Although the Big Bang Theory is widely accepted, it probably will never be proved; consequentially, leaving a number of tough, unanswered questions. ”
…and what the heck is that giant “Bang!” doing in the diagram? NASA?!
Can you say “Douglas Feith, Director of the Office of Special Projects and the dumbest f****** guy on the planet“? Hell, can you say “President Bush”?
I’m sure that George Deutsch overstepped his mandate; I doubt that the “Big Bang is just a theory” line was a cabinet-level decision. The point is that it’s not an isolated incident; people like that absolutely permeate the government. The consequences are manifest and horrifying in Iraq and New Orleans; everywhere else they’re more subtle but equally damaging.
Do not take this lightly. Many people do not understand what theory means and the religous right is using that to attack naturalism and all science. It has been the biologists and the philosophers fighting for all acience, now it’s time for physics to weigh in.
It also about more than just the scientific evidence, it has to be presented well. It’s time for another great popularizer of science to arise. Ken Miller is a model of waht can be done on the biologiy side, Dawkins is too harsh for Americans to listen too. We need another Sagan or Attenborough to show the wonders of what we do and don’t know and why we know it. Maybe Simon Singh? Brian Greene?
“more than a science issue”. I guess there you have it.
“and on the 6th day he created the cosmic microwave background radiation so several generations of scientists would be completely misled into thinking that at some point the universe was small and then became large….”
Elliot
Where is the sound science behind the theory of the big bang? Where’s the sound science behind global warming? Face it — both theories are part of the liberal program to take God out of science and blame all the world’s problems on George Bush.
Leonidas: You might like to start by going here, paying particular attention to astro-ph and gr-qc. Of course, the clincher is here but you sound as though you’ll dismiss the Big Bang model regardless of any amount of evidence in its favour.
Nice post, Elliot.
It’s pretty scary when a religious issue is more important than a science issue.
Anyway, it’s ridiculous that any deity would change the universe in all the right places so as to make scientists reach the wrong conclusions. Things fall essentially the same way in many different situations, and they all are approximately the same as the most ideal laboratory free-fall setting. Ripples move over the surface of water in essentially the same way inside or outside the laboratory. Despite the lack of strict controls in everyday life, the everyday universe acts essentially the same as the laboratory setting. Anyone who has taken a laboratory science course should have direct experience with this. Why should it be any different with fossils or a cosmic microwave background? The only real difference is one of human preconception, not that the universe changes whenever someone with a PhD bothers to take a disciplined look.
An update on George Deutsch: Apparently, Deutsch was also involved in the recent kerfuffle over James Hansen, the climate scientist who claimed that the Bush administration tried to silence him. As if that wasn’t enough, Deutsch has apparently admitted in the past that his job at NASA was to reject requests from liberal media to interview Hansen and also “to make the president look good”
Strange that, given that his job was as a public affairs at NASA and not at the White House…
I’m a little more worried about the slipping in of ID than the theory labeling. IANAAstrophysicist, but the Big Bang isn’t something I normally think of as rock solid. Are we not still making predictions and adjusting parameters?
I was at a talk by Stephen Hawking (again, I have no appreciation for his work, just his poignant ruminations on life, science, and the future) and was impressed by his conjecture that maybe the Big Bang was a collision of two spaces–a violent striking in higher dimensions that resonated ours into existence. This is how I think of the Big Bank and our origins, but I don’t tend to think it as elevated to a Law or Fact yet.
Sorry, I don’t mean to spoil the party. Let me repeat: Are we not still making (occasionally wrong) predictions and adjusting parameters?
#1 (Kea)
Your post reminded me of a quote in Seed Magazine that at one time gave me great hope.
But then I realized that I misread that quote. I though he said invulnerable instead of vulnerable. Then depression set in… the science superhero met his bane/kryptonite. That’s why I drink instead of being a physicist.
hugechavz:
I would say that the issue is that “the Big Bang” is not necessarily clearly defined. What is conclusively established is that the universe used to be much smaller and hotter and that it has gradually expanded and cooled. At some point it was extremely uniform and radiation-dominated, and over time some small non-uniformities became galaxies, and currently matter and dark energy make up most of the energy density and radiation only a small fraction. This is what a physicist typically has in mind when talking about how the Big Bang is well-established.
On the other hand, general relativity leads one to expect that the initial condition for all of this was singular, and I think this has become the popular conception of the Big Bang: that there was some singular point which expanded to become the whole universe. This isn’t something that’s understood; we tend to think quantum gravity will smooth out the singularity, and the initial condition is not at all clear. One attempt at explaining it is the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction. One might expect the early universe to not have a geometric description at all. It’s all very murky, and extremely difficult to probe. (Part of the early and not well-understood part of the story is inflation, which we are gradually getting better hints about from experiment, but even that won’t really tell us about the real initial condition.)
So the upshot is that, properly understood, the “Big Bang” really is firmly established by experiment. There is absolutely no doubt that the universe has expanded from a hot dense state. On the other hand the very early history is still unclear, and will probably remain so for quite some time. Inflation tends to wipe out information about what happened before, so it’s possible that we’ll never truly experimentally probe the earlier stuff. In that case we could just see what the theory we construct from everything we can probe has to tell us about such things. And at this point, that’s a big mystery.