these areas of academic study had become playgrounds for frauds, but that there was absolutely nothing that could not be said, studied or claimed so long as it fitted into the pre-existing theories and presumptions of the relevant fields and utilized its disastrous language. So long as people were willing to claim that we live in a patriarchal soci

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The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. But any such assessment encounters an immediate and almost insuperable challenge. Who can speak about the true health of the ever-expanding universe of human knowledge, given how complex, esoteric, and specialized the many scientific and technolo... See more

Physicists come off looking particularly bad. After attending a Stephen Hawking lecture about fantastical ideas like wormholes and superstrings and “mini-superspace,” Horgan concludes that Hawking is “less a truth seeker than an artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker” whose work “can keep us awestruck. But it is not science.”