Why do people believe weird things? Just yesterday, I was amused and confused at the same time reading the Spiegel article on more than a dozen of the more prominent prophets claiming the end of the world was nigh - who of course all survived their doomsday if they didn't take their lives themselves. I get the same weird feeling whenever I go to the website that keeps postponing the end of the world (current date is December 14, 2009). For no apparent reason, some people choose to believe in something and cannot be convinced otherwise. To this day, I cannot understand what is so difficult in admitting you were wrong, when clearly it makes you look much worse when you keep believing nonsense.

For instance, the Catholic Church fought tooth and nail to suppress Galileo's finding that the earth was not the center of the universe, because they believed that's where humanity ought to be. Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union suppressed modern genetics, because it meant that re-education of dissidents into good communists might no always be possible. Einstein's theory of relativity was branded "Jewish science" by the Nazis and dismissed, because they believed Jews can never be right in anything. Still today, the religious right in the USA fights the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools, because they think it contradicts some bronze-age statements in their favorite ancient book. Most recently, this last movement has seen a collusion with right-wing ideologues (also in the US) denying global warming or at least that humans are a driving force in it, because they either believe their god would not let humans do anything bad to our planet, or because the believe the rapture should be coming any day now anyway or, finally, because they have stakes in the oil industry; or some combination of the three.

Thus, throughout the history of science, there have been anti-science movements driving opinion by political rather than scientific means and for motives having nothing to do with science. Just as in all these previous occasions, science will prevail, for the same reason you can't convince people for long that stones will fall upwards if you drop them or that the emperor has new clothes: nature doesn't lie. But besides waiting to see what happens (which might not be advisable in the case of global warming), how are non-scientists to decide who's on the side of science? One cue is to look at the people in question. What do all the anti-science people have in common over the centuries? They're either religious or some radical political ideologues, or in the worst case both at the same time. Unfortunately, this is not always all that easy to decide, especially since skilled ideologues try to muddy the waters by attempting to convince non-scientists that all scientists are criminal ideologues themselves.

There is one crucial argument, however, which gives away that ideology can never survive in science and that argument lies in the answer to the question of why Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg, etc. are celebrity scientists: they broke with current thinking and brought new theories to the table which improved our understanding of the world. No scientist ever became famous by repeating old wisdom or adhering to long falsified hypotheses. No scientist ever gets ahead in science by repeating old experiments. In fact, one could go so far as saying that science is the antithesis of ideology and dogma: if you want to excell in science, you have to come up with something genuinely new. Changing your mind in the face of overwhelming evidence and admitting you've been wrong is one of the most crucial qualities of any scientist. It has happened that something too new and advanced has taken some time to take hold and faced some initial resistance. After all, scientists are human, too. However, in the end, the data always wins. More importantly, what has never happened, to my knowledge, is that a theory once adopted in a consensus but later discarded in the face of overwhelming evidence, has ever made a comeback and won the scientific community back.