The Crime of Reason: and the Closing of the Scientific Mind
DOI: 10.1063/1.3177232
Robert Laughlin, author of The Crime of Reason, and the Closing of the Scientific Mind, has won many physics prizes and awards, including a share of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect. His first book, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (Basic Books, 2005), is a popularization aimed at a broad readership that lacks specialized scientific or technical training (see the review by Anthony Leggett in Physics Today, October 2005, page 77 ). His second book, Looking for a Hero (privately published in 2006), describes his experiences as the first foreign president of the Korea Advanced Institute of science and Technology. With this, his third effort—a mere 30 000 words, and not graced by a single equation—Laughlin again addresses a general audience, but he now treats a topic that bears little relation to his field of expertise.
The Crime of Reason manifests Laughlin’s evidently sincere concerns about increasing restrictions on the dissemination of knowledge. He gives as examples the practice of attaching a “classified” label to any information that might conceivably be employed to endanger a nation’s security and the growing willingness of governments to grant patents that limit the accessibility of new research discoveries.
Those concerns have led Laughlin to the primary—essentially, the sole—thesis of the present volume. I can do no better than quote from the book’s dust jacket:
Many of us believe that in our modern, Internet-enabled world, information is more freely available than ever before. But according to … Laughlin, this is a dangerous delusion. We are surrounded by mounting volumes of advertising and spam, but a great deal of truly valuable information is increasingly classified or designated as private property. More and more, a flash of insight can become a patent infringement or threat to national security. More and more, the act of reasoning for oneself is becoming a crime. … In this dangerous new era, free intellectual inquiry—something once valued and honored—has become an antisocial and often illegal activity.
To support his contentions, Laughlin uses categorical and declarative sentences throughout the 10 chapters. He includes no supporting tables or figures but makes many a detour into such peripheral topics as cryptography (chapter 2) and cloning (chapter 8); on the latter, the author does not hesitate to divulge his strong opinions. Laughlin is an excellent writer and obviously very smart. In fact, he appears to be a polymath. For example, A Different Universe is replete with cartoons he drew himself, and his Stanford University website lists a number of his piano compositions.
Though I, like Laughlin, deplore restrictions on the dissemination of knowledge, I must say that on the whole I find Laughlin’s thesis too apocalyptic and therefore unconvincing, as, I judge, would most of his thoughtful readers. For instance, US patent law is undoubtedly restrictive, as Laughlin claims. But even in recent years it has permitted the creation, often by small computer firms, of many highly inventive and startlingly useful computer programs. Moreover, intellectual creativity is not and never has been confined, as suggested in the dust jacket quote, to matters that may infringe on patents or threaten national security. That quote hardly pertains to the work of artists, historians, archaeologists, or marriage counselors. Of course, Laughlin is aware of that, but in his book he seems to imply that even those professionals and their insights are rapidly obsolescing because of modern economic activity.
As Laughlin puts it in chapter 2, “Dangerous Knowledge,”
If you want, you can fill your head with knowledge that couldn’t possibly be dangerous, such as telephone numbers or grains of sand, but you’ll soon be unemployed if you do. Everyone knows this. If you want to survive, you had better acquire knowledge that empowers you and is therefore potentially dangerous. That’s what other people want to buy.
My problems with Laughlin’s thesis also are illustrated by the following quote from chapter 10, “The Troubled Utopia”:
The criminalization of knowledge threatens our creative cultural traditions. Demoting geeks from Internet heroes to thieves, guerrilla warriors, and spies … will have consequences…. The point is only that it’s foolish to think of the creative technical traditions as a bottomless well that will never run dry—a kind of genetic birthright to which European civilization will always be entitled. These traditions sprang into being quite by accident during the Renaissance and have no more imperative to exist forever than an auk or a dodo.
Once again I, like Laughlin, fear the possibility that future generations will be significantly less creative than our own. But I cannot believe that such a diminution of human creativity, if it does occur, is more likely to be a consequence of modern economic activity, patent law, and security restrictions than of war, pestilence, and energy shortages. Actually, I foresee that the recent remarkable loosening of social restrictions in the US, exemplified inter alia by the election of Barack Obama and the growing willingness to legalize same-sex marriages, will stimulate an enduring flood of creativity in a wide variety of disciplines, including the sciences. In so writing, I am quite aware that this is a review of Laughlin’s book, wherein what I foresee should be irrelevant. However, I could find nothing in the book that would make my prediction unreasonable.
All in all, I found The Crime of Reason quite interesting and am glad to have read it. I recommend you read it too. You’ll enjoy it, though I doubt you’ll agree with its thesis.
More about the Authors
Edward Gerjuoy. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US .
