At this week’s Pinhead Town Talk, “Is it Science? — Global warming, intelligent design, the cosmic anthropic principle, and Einstein’s moon,” Dr. Michael Kellman, will touch upon issues few of his colleagues would dare address in public.

“Science at the edge is always very unsettling and full of controversy,” the University of Oregon Professor of Theoretical Chemistry & Physical Chemistry said in a recent interview. “It is mysterious. I am suspicious of any orthodoxy that arises from science until the dust settles.”

Giving the fifth annual “R. Stephen Berry Lecture” for the Telluride Science Research Center, honoring its founder, Kellman will undoubtedly spark controversy among his own colleagues and the public, who are invited to join the debate on Tuesday August 7th at 6:00 – 7:15 p.m. at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village. Admission is free and there will be a cash bar.

Kellman, who admits to have a bias for mathematical equations and concedes that his background in physics and chemistry colors his thinking, will discuss the role belief and dogma play in science.

“When biologists are not feeling defensive, they admit that there is a lot not understood about evolution,” he said. “In public, biologists tend to overstate their case. Evolution is too young and under-analyzed, too complex to be a real theory. To the biologists who claim that evolution is as well established a scientific theory as the law of gravity, I would say to them, ‘You don’t understand the law of gravity.’” To evolution’s foes, he suggests, “If I were looking for intelligent design, I would be looking for it in the physical universe, not the biological.”

Of physicists today, particularly string theorists who contemplate the universe, Kellman takes the position that they are swirling in belief systems rather than grounded in solid science. “String theorists really believe that there are 10500 universes and that all are real and we just happen to live in one that is fine tuned for life. ‘God didn’t do this, they suggest, ‘We humans are just lucky.’ These are the most respected physicists like Leonard Susskind professor of theoretical physics at Stanford and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. These physicists are not thought to be cranks. But, I believe you can compare their ideas to religion.”

Evolution and cosmology encompass a time element that is nearly infinite, and the processes these scientists are trying to reconstruct are enormously complex. Time, complexity, and crude records make science tough. Experimentation and reproducibility, the backbone of science, do not readily lend themselves to these fields.

In quantum mechanics, however, experimentation and reproducibility are readily available. And yet, mysteries abound. “Einstein, almost alone, stood against quantum orthodoxy,” says Kellman. In protest against quantum mechanics, Einstein posed the question, “Do you really believe that the moon only exists when you are looking at it? “He thought a new theory would be needed to replace quantum theory,” Kelllman continued. “He was ridiculed, thought to be losing his marbles. But that was not the case. Now the scientific community is conceding that he did indeed bring up great questions that are still unanswered. It is still very mysterious. Maybe a replacement theory is needed. Orthodoxy can change.”

Kellman says he will be speaking from the same position as any lay person in the audience. “I hear conflicting claims. What am I supposed to make of it?” Please come to this Tuesday’s Pinhead Town Talk, 6:00 pm at the Conference Center to hear a scientist address issues that effect us all and hear him openly critique his own field.

“The good thing about science,” Kellman admits, “is there are ways to sort things out through observation and experimentation. Eventually, hopefully, the dust does settle.”

This summer science lecture series is sponsored by the Town of Mountain Village. For more information about the Pinhead Town Talk, please call Nana Naisbitt at 970-708-0004 or visit telluridescience.org.

Quantum mechanics says that there is ‘spooky action at a distance,” says Kellman. “Einstein believed this was unacceptable. Even today, no one can explain this. According to experiments, there is this spooky action at a distance [the interaction of two objects which are separated in space with no known mediator of the interaction] of many miles apart. It is instantaneous and faster that the speed of light. This is not supposed to happen. But it does. Theoretically it could happen the distance of the entire universe. A scientist can predict it will happen, but cannot explain how it works or why. It is like magic. Nobody has any good ideas about how it works. And this is the most scientific of the things I will discuss at the talk because we have these are experiments we can measure.”

Do I believe that the earth revolves around the sun? Yes. Evolution? Darwin’s Origin of Species? No. It is still mysterious. Still not understood.

That was true of the 16th Century Scientific Revolution and it is still true today. Science at the edge still deals with things that are very mysterious. With evolution you cannot do experiment in real time. You cannot make a new species. Evolution does not take place in human time and the fossil record is very crude. Did evolution take place? Sure I would concede to that. Did it occur because of random natural processes and natural selection? We can’t say that. We can’t reproduce that in a lab. Can you predict a new species into existence? If it’s random, there is no prediction possible.

Different sciences have different scientific methods. Butterfly net versus lasers. They only superficially follow the same methods. Back to issues of time and complexity.

Are you biased as a physical scientists? Yes. That probably does color what I consider to be an adequate scientific theory. I like mathematical theories. I am definitely on the physics/chemistry end of things.

‘Scientists at the University of Arizona may have witnessed the birth of a new species. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.’

“Global warming. Both sides are overly dogmatic, operating out of a belief system. Science on the edge is colored by belief and people tend to dig in their heals. Good thing about science is there are ways to sort things out: obersvation and experimentation. Eventually, hopefully, the dust does settle. We find out the answers one way or the other. Chemistry is easy, cosmology is much harder. Fourteen billion years is a long time ago.

What is science? It is often about being able to do experiments in real time.

We tend to take dogmatic positions. Dogma is about belief systems. You can compare it to religion.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007
6:00 – 7:15 p.m.
Free admission, Cash bar
Conference Center

B.S., University of California, Berkeley, 1971. Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1977 ?(R. Stephen Berry). Postdoctoral: University of Oregon, 1977–79 (David R. Herrick); Columbia University 1979–80 (Philip Pechukas); Assistant Professor, Northeastern University, 1981-1987; Associate Professor, Northeastern University, 1987-1989. At Oregon since 1989.

July 20, 2007
Contact Nana Naisbitt, Executive Director
Telluride Science Research Center
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