Poisoned Science: (The 1960s Corruption of Scientific Methods for Careers and Causes) (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781533645081)

Lawrence Dawson is an autodidact whose science department has become the internet. His formal academic training had ended in the political convulsions which deconstructed Columbia University in the late 1960s. As a student Fellow of the Faculty under the tutelage of Robert K. Merton, one of the founders of the sociology of science and perhaps the nation's best "meta-scientist," the author had watched the university recomposed by a radical epistemology which undermined the scientific method. Prior to the 1960s student uprising, the linguistics of Ludwig Wittgenstein had begun to dominate the department. Wittgenstein taught that language could never test reality since all linguistic meaning was only a social consensus. Wittgensteinianism was compatible with an emerging scientific corruption which was replacing empiricism with a non-tested consensus. Only a few years previously, Hubble's constant, which had provided the foundation for the popular "Big Bang" theory and an expanding universe, had been revised downward by consensus even though the revision was incompatible with Hubble's original data set. The revision occurred because the "consensus" needed a longer age for the universe than Hubble's original constant had provided. The author found himself intellectually paralyzed in the recomposed university which was replacing data and hypothesis testing with a Witttgensteinian generated social consensus as the means of determining scientific truth. That paralysis excluded him from an academic career. It was 25 years later when, as an editor for a small academic publisher which was monitoring scientists who had lost employment due to unapproved research directions, that the author found the indisputable evidence for the damage that Wittgensteinian consensus had done to science. The 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry had been given for a set of equations which had been disproved prior to the award. However, the disproving data had been completely suppressed in a consensus dominated scientific press and this suppression had allowed the Nobel to go forward. This discovery led to the book "The Death of Reality" which documented the damage which Wittgenstein had done to science and to the culture in general.