Introduction
In which we introduce the idea of the "Semmelweis Effect."
In 1846, the general hospital of Vienna was in the midst of an epidemic. Childbed fever, a disease which affected delivering mothers and their infants, was widespread at the time but especially potent at the hospital, where it killed 459 women that year. The disease had been known since antiquity, and there were many theories as to its cause, yet still it raged on.
The next year, a new assistant of obstetrics, Ignaz Semmelweis, arrived and took an interest in the disease. In his time, our understanding of medicine was itself newborn, as was our understanding of how to do science, but the most forward practitioners were learning to use the scientific method to understand medicine. Ignaz was open to these ideas, dedicated to a cause, and, as it turns out, fearless in his ability to reject bad ideas of prior thinkers while looking for fresh insight. He sifted through hospital records. He spent week after week in the morgue.
When a friend and mentor was accidentally pierced in the finger with a knife during an autopsy, and later died from symptoms similar to childbed fever, Semmelweis conjectured that perhaps invisible ``cavaderous'' particles had been transmitted into his body from that of the fever victim on the table. Perhaps the disease was transmissible, but not contagious by conventional means.
It was routine for university students to perform autopsies on cadavers at the hospital and, often in the same day, meet with patients at the laying-in ward. Semmelweis quickly put an end to this and instituted new procedures for washing hands and bedding in a chloride of lime, a solution hitherto used for removing odors.
Within a year, incidence of fever had sharply declined in reaction to the new method. Semmelweis' progress was celebrated by his young peers at the hospital. The disease lingered, but the bells of the parishioner were seldom heard in the ward; new mothers and their infants were returning to their homes flush with the joy of new life. Vienna, already an attraction for students and practitioners, was poised to become the epicenter of a new way of doing medicine.
At the conclusion of Semmelweis' two year assistantship, the director of the laying-in hospital fired him.
* * *
In the course of history there are moments when one individual rises above his or her peers with a fresh understanding of nature, overturning years of thought, to usher in a new era of technological advance. We would like to believe that as a society we are able to quickly absorb new discoveries, but in fact the barrier is high. First, we must recognize when a discovery has been made, and second, we must be willing to accept it.
Serendipitous events are often ignored until there is a good theory to explain them. They may be absorbed ad hoc by the dominant theory, revealing that just as the human body defends itself from disease, established ideas defend themselves from disconfirming evidence. When a new theory does emerge, it must compete with its predecessors, with extraordinary effort by the few willing to undertake speculative research. Major discoveries are by nature disruptive; the more disruptive, the more reluctantly we accept them.
Semmelweis struggled against the inertia of old ideas held by aged practitioners. He was in a mix of social and political tensions in Vienna. And he carried a message that no one wanted to believe: that doctors carried death on their hands. Somehow, his ideas were communicated poorly, misunderstood, and in the eyes of his peers, quickly debunked. Like a stone skipping off the surface of a pond, his ideas were ignored, even while he perfected his technique and virtually eliminated the fever from his wards.
Semmelweis was consumed by his frustration and lashed out in anguish at his fellow practitioners. It was not until after Semmelweis' death, thirty years after his initial discovery, that the medical community came around.
Thirty years of broken families, thirty years of heartbreak.
We might call this the ``Semmelweis Effect,'' when an idea meets seemingly irrational resistance and is forgotten for a generation. It is painful to realize that this happens time and again in modern science; each case due to a unique combination of circumstance and bias. It is more painful to accept that it may be happening now, today, in our scientifically enlightened age. Perhaps, in our adolescence, we are still learning how to do science.
Our scientific community has grown, as has the volume of its written output. In the daily barrage of new ideas, we have learned to make fast judgments on incomplete information using a variety of context-sensitive clues. These heuristics may work for the slow advancement of science along predictable lines, but not unusual cases. If a major discovery presents in the wrong context, it may be ignored, the discoverer deemed a fool.
It is perhaps for some of these reasons that Randell Mills has had such trouble. In 1991, Mills emerged in the wake of the cold fusion fiasco with the claim that he had unified the forces of physics with a new theory of the atom, and discovered a new clean source of energy, derived from a new kind of hydrogen. By the time I discovered his work, 10 years later, he was outside the scientific mainstream, ignored or ridiculed by many. One could easily mistake him for a lonely fool caught up in his own infinite energy fantasy.
But Mills had found millions in venture capital which he funneled into a large laboratory outside Princeton; he had a team of Ph.D. scientists including plasma physicists and chemical engineers with whom he had published dozens of papers in scientific journals. He had found important collaborators to replicate and back his work. Further, he proposed elegant solutions to fundamental, century-old problems in atomic physics. I immediately liked his ideas; his efforts seemed genuine, his work brilliant and fearless, and the implications of his discovery could shake the foundations of our knowledge.
At the heart of Mills' story is the atom, and the theories we use to describe it. Early in the twentieth century, physicists struggled to reconcile new phenomena with the laws of physics known at the time, the so-called ``classical'' laws of nature that included electrodynamics and mechanics. They ran into a dead end, and to make progress they cast aside these laws, with a new theory of quantum mechanics.
A century later, the world has changed. We failed to predict dark matter or dark energy. We look out into space and see mysteries everywhere: in the neutrino emissions of the sun, in the tempo of quasars, in the diffuse emissions of galaxies. Quantum mechanics, often hailed as the greatest achievement of science, is at an utter loss to explain even the behavior of a single electron bubble trapped in liquid helium. Our theories have waned, their technological potential gone sterile, yet their philosophical controversies linger endlessly on.
The legacy of the quantum century has been to divorce physics from reality; avant-garde theorists speak of multiple colliding universes and strings in eleventh-dimensional space, theories with no predictive value or means by which to prove themselves true.
Mills, working almost in isolation, returned to the question that faced the physicists of 1915: Why is the atom stable? How does the electron move? He approached it afresh, as if classical laws had not withered on the vine. And his ideas unleash a cascade of new understanding, from the structure of subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules, to the evolution of the cosmos, the nature of dark matter, and the fate of black holes. It is a theory impregnated with new technologies and new testable predictions.
After twenty-five years of work, Mills' story is, like that of Semmelweis, a complex enigma sewn in layers of history, sociology, and politics. Here we will learn about his discovery and theories, critics and collaborators, legal battles and technological efforts, set against questions fundamental to progress in science: How do we identify major discoveries? Good science from bad? Great minds from peddling fools? Why are we bound by the inertia of past beliefs?
We will find that in our pursuit of science we carry with us the baggage that is human nature, with its hopes and dreams, biases and frailties, and bursts of genius that push us forward to a better future.
Brett Holverstott
wow - great intro.
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