New York Times unskeptically presents discredited physics theory
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8122
To what extent, if any, should a public science forum like the New York Times’ weekly Science Times section—in business to make money—insist on scientific credibility when it comes to paid advertising not about commerce, but about science?
A nearly identical question came up in this venue in March 2014, when the Science Times ran an ad for a button-size gizmo purporting to counteract cellphone emissions purported to cause cancer. The question comes up again for an ad dominating the right side of page D3 in the 9 June Science Times under the heading “Autodynamics new paradigm in physics-cosmology.” With equations, diagrams, and hundreds of tiny-font words, the ad crows that something called autodynamics theory “removes all the misconceptions of Lorentz and Einstein.”
At the bottom, the ad attributes itself to the Society for the Advancement for [sic] Autodynamics in Long Beach, California. In line with Wikipedia’s autodynamics entry , a 1999 article in Wired reported the following:
Mainstream physicists have considered autodynamics a crackpot theory for decades, and most agree that an experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1984 proved the theory wrong.
“As far as I was concerned autodynamics was disproved. Special relativity is correct,” said Pierre Noyes, professor in the theoretical physics section at SLAC, and lead researcher of the 1984 experiment.
Wired also included this passage:
“A lot of claims are made about ‘relativity’ being wrong, in some way that has something to do with neutrinos,” said Lee Smolin, physics professor at Penn State University.
“There is no serious attempt [by the autodynamics supporters] to make an argument or to discuss the mountains of experimental data that refute their basic claims, for example, in which people every day produce and detect neutrinos in laboratories.”
Assuming—maybe wrongly—that Science Times editors have a say in ad acceptance, isn’t the Times asserting, in effect, credibility for autodynamics theory? Isn’t the Times at least countenancing such an assertion, and doesn’t that inevitably conflict with the Times’ own standard practice of interposing skilled journalists’ intellects between readers and claims about science? Often news pages include advertisements in the form of screeds about politics. Does science’s special authority impose different obligations for science pages concerning screeds about science?
The ad’s subhead trumpets, “A new approach to see the universe.” That’s precisely the category of the astrophysics article spreading across that week’s entire Science Times front page and two full pages inside, all of it skillfully and elegantly written by Dennis Overbye. He reports on an effort involving “20 universities, observatories, research institutions and government agencies, and more than a hundred scientists” to take what a Times blurb calls “a picture of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.” Especially for science-minded readers disappointed in the Times about the autodynamics, the ad contrasts starkly with the article, illuminating the obvious journalism questions.
Overbye quotes Andrew Strominger of Harvard about what the astronomers are doing: “It’s beautiful work.” The reporter uses all of his skills to show readers why Strominger would say that—for example, in this passage:
If [astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman] and his colleagues succeed, the images they capture will be in textbooks forever, as definitive evidence of Einstein’s weirdest prediction: that space-time could curl up like a magician’s cloak around massive objects and vanish them from the universe. In short, that black holes—objects so dense that not even light can escape their maws—are real. That space and time as we know them can come to an end right under our noses.
Conversely, they could produce evidence that Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, the rule of rules for the universe, needs fixing for the first time since it was introduced a hundred years ago.
Overbye adds, “If they are lucky, sometime later this summer or fall, then, they might see emerging from the computers at M.I.T. the first rough image of a black hole. And its size and shape could provide a judgment on general relativity, the harshest test yet a century after Einstein dreamed up the theory.”
The Times commissioned Overbye to insert his intellect between readers and scientists in reporting on this noble astrophysics investigation that probes and tests Einstein’s work. The Times also accepted and unskeptically ran a somewhat rambling screed about a discredited physics theory purporting to expose Einstein’s alleged “misconceptions.” Does the fact that the screed is a paid ad untether it from the Times’ own highly respected practice of science journalism?
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.