Meteorites and Other Anomalies

What can the meteorite controversy tell us about the reactions of the scientific community to other anomalies? I think it offers several important lessons. The first is that in some cases the decisions of scientists about anomalous events are dependent on social intelligence. Somehow the relevant information has to reach the relevant people; in some cases this will mean that it will have to cross the boundary between the scientific community and the rest of society. Where anomalous events are involved, however, this kind of communication is fraught with difficulties. Mistrust and ridicule are common components of scientists' response to nonscientists' reports of anomalous events n1See the articles by the author cited in note 3.. Even where these responses are not present, indifference and ignorance on the part of non-scientists, and the anticipation of negative reactions from scientists, may impede reporting.

The second lesson is the paradoxical attitude of scientists toward the social intelligence system. On the one hand, scientists are extremely sceptical toward reports of anomalous events coming from the social intelligence system. This is a perfectly natural reaction, grounded in the history of science itself and borne out by repeated experiences of fraud and error in social intelligence about unusual events. The mistrust and ridicule with which reports of unusual events are often greeted by scientists are very functional in the ordinary course of affairs. Yet scientists tend to believe that somehow the real anomalous events will be successfully transmitted by social intelligence, and that therefore there will be no great difficulties connected with information about such events. In the meteorite case this presumption was incorrect. Real anomalous events were taking place, and savants' negative attitudes toward the reports did impede the flow of information. I invite the reader to consider whether similar problems may not today impede the flow of information to scientists about real anomalies, as we know it does in regard to hypothetical ones like UFOs and sea-serpents.

The third lesson is that scientific acceptance is likely to be connected to scientists' ability to control the data in some way. Where this control is difficult to implement, as in the case of ball lightning, for instance, continued scepticism on the part of the scientific community is the probable result s1S. Singer, The Nature of Ball Lightning (New York: Plenum Press, 1971); and especially E. Garfield, 'When Citation Analysis Strikes Ball Lightning', Current Contents, Vol. 8, No. 20 (17 May 1976), 5-16.. Yet this control itself is often dependent on scientists' willingness to attend to the signals of the social intelligence system long enough to do some useful research. We saw that the cursory examination accorded to the Luce stone by the Académie des Sciences was insufficient. The important chemical analyses at the turn of the century, on the other hand, were the product of strong intellectual commitments to the reality of meteorite falls. If there is a common or interesting element in the data, some scientist has to pay close enough attention to the reports to detect what it is. At times this may involve taking intellectual and professional risks, as Chladni did. And as the meteorite controversy illustrates, paying close attention to the reports is not always sufficient to produce conviction, even if a real anomaly is involved. G. A. DeLuc, for instance, was very knowledgeable about reports, but until the l'Aigle fall he never gave them the least credence; and he accepted the reality of the l'Aigle fall very reluctantly s2G. A. DeLuc, Observations sur un Ouvrage intitulé Lithologie Atmosphérique (Geneva: G. J. Manget, 1803), 39.. For most scientists, however, the ability to check the data and the acceptance of the phenomenon go hand in hand.

A fourth lesson we might draw from the controversy, but which we can only briefly discuss here, is the importance of theory in validating data. Several aspects of the meteorite phenomenon seemed inexplicable at various points in the controversy: the fall itself; the globe of fire; the relatively low velocity in the lower atmosphere leading to shallow penetration of the soil. Linguistic confusion was engendered by use of the words 'thunderstone' and 'lightning-stone', and the false connection with storms interfered with a proper understanding of the nature of the falling stones. Not until Laplace and Biot put forward the 'lunar volcano' theory did most savants feel that a possible explanation existed, even though the correct explanation had been earlier propounded by Chladni. LaCroix put the problem very nicely:

When a phaenomenon is announced, if we are able to ascertain, by a complete enumeration of the different physical agents, that none of them is capable of producing it, the impossibility of the phaenomenon would be the evident result, and consequently the falsity of the account.

But, on the other hand, when we find a cause which establishes the probability of it, if sound logic forbids us to ascribe it exclusively to this cause, it commands us at the same time to substitute doubt for complete negation, and to employ every means possible of confirming the fact, because it is not repugnant to the laws of nature s3 S. -F. Lacroix, 'On the Stones supposed to have fallen from the Clouds', Philosophical Magazine, Vol. 15 (February 1803), 187-88, at 187. This is an obvious echo of the views of Biot, op. cit. note 25..

To put the matter bluntly, if we cannot explain a phenomenon, we ought to reject reports of its existence, if these reports come from non-scientists. And we have already seen that some contemporary philosophers are willing to go further to reject unexplainable data, even from scientists. Certainly the credibility of ball lightning has suffered from the inadequacy of the theories offered to explain it. The logical implications of this question are beyond my scope here n2But see J. Agassi, 'When Should We Ignore Evidence in Favour of a Hypothesis?', in J. Agassi, Science in Flux (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), 127-54., but there is no question that this principle of 'what is unexplainable is impossible' is frequently applied by scientists to reports of anomalous events s4For instance, see W. Markowitz, 'The Physics and Metaphysics of Unidentified Flying Objects', Science, Vol. 157 (15 September 1967), 1274-79..