As a student, Princeton’s Dean of the College Michael Gordin took one class in the history of science and was hooked. 

“I was just drawn to the richness, the philosophical and the historical richness of the scientific enterprise,” he told incoming transfer students and members of the Class of 2029 at Princeton’s annual Pre-read Assembly on Sunday evening. 

Now a decorated scholar in the discipline, Gordin has written numerous books as a historian of science — on Einstein, the periodic table, and the critical “Five Days in August” when World War II became a nuclear war, among many other topics. 

The Pre-read Assembly in Jadwin Gymnasium focused on his 2021 book, “On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience,” which Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber selected for incoming students to read over the summer as their introduction to the intellectual life of the University. 

Gordin’s slim volume, clocking in at just 101 pages, explores how scientists and others have wrestled for centuries to distinguish science from pseudoscience. The book grew out of the longtime class taught by Gordin, “The History of Pseudoscience.”

Princeton and other universities distinguish between science and pseudoscience and, more broadly, between what is “scholarly” and what is not, Eisgruber told the students in the foreword to the Pre-read edition of the book. “Thinking about how and why we draw these distinctions will help you to benefit fully from your time studying here,” he wrote. 

“I also like On the Fringe because, though it is neither partisan nor overtly political, it bears upon some public controversies much in the news, including issues about vaccine safety and climate change,” he wrote. “Denouncing views as ‘pseudoscientific’ can affect — justifiably or not — how they fare in political as well as scholarly debate.”

Past Pre-read book topics have included freedom of speech, standing up to dictators, supporting first-generation college students, and how to live a meaningful life.

A wide-ranging scholarly conversation

At the assembly, after warm introductions from Dean of the Faculty Gene Jarrett, Eisgruber and Gordin had a wide-ranging conversation that touched on topics labeled as pseudoscience over time, including alchemy, the Loch Ness Monster, parapsychology and UFOs, within a scholarly discussion about the scientific method and the academic freedom to pursue novel ideas.

Early in their conversation, Eisgruber noted that many of Gordin’s previous books focused on “big achievements in science” and “grand philosophical ideas.” He then asked, “How did you get into writing a book about pseudoscience?”

Gordin admitted that his mentors had discouraged his long-standing interest in the field — “I was told that fringy people study fringy things, and ‘You don’t want to be a fringy person’” — but that he pursued the study anyway.

One of his curiosities was about the people who espouse fringy ideas, like Flat Earthers, who choose to disbelieve the globes in classrooms and photographs from space of our spherical planet. “People have made an active choice to believe the Earth is not round, when they’ve heard the Earth is round the entirety of their lives. That decision is fascinating to me, and I don’t fully understand it, and so I am intrigued,” Gordin said. 

“As it evolved over time, I realized that there was an argument about the fringe and the boundary between science and nonscience and pseudoscience that I wanted to articulate,” he said. 

“One of the things I love about the history of science is that science is made by humans, and humans are weird,” Gordin said. “I think that the ability to understand that we’re fallible, and yet we come up with this amazing intellectual enterprise that is science despite the fact that we’re human and fallible, is amazing. It makes it more interesting, not less.”

More than 1,500 incoming first-year students and transfer students gathered to listen to Eisgruber and Gordin discuss the book. 

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Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

‘Let’s have a real conversation’

Gordin noted that “pseudoscience” is a term used only against people; no one ever calls themself a pseudoscientist. He encouraged the students to avoid the label. Instead, he said, present facts. 

“Calling them a pseudoscientist is not going to help persuade them that they’re wrong, it’s only going to persuade people who already agree with you,” he said. “Let’s say you make a claim about UFOs that is incorrect. So let’s talk about aerodynamics, and let’s talk about faster-than-light travel. Let’s have a real conversation about your assumptions here, rather than calling names.

“We can’t debunk everything, and what we should do is focus on those doctrines that we think are pernicious, that have serious environmental and health consequences,” Gordin said, citing measles vaccine skepticism as an example.

“For two and a half centuries,” vaccine science was “the most credible form of science,” noted the historian. “There was no question that this worked, because smallpox went away! In fact, it’s been eradicated globally, through vaccines. There’s lots of evidence that this works. Why is it not persuasive anymore?

“The fact that a lot of people don’t want to believe it is not something that you can change by calling them names,” Gordin said. “You’ve got to try to figure out better ways of persuading them.”

Science and politics

Eisgruber asked Gordin to expand on a sentiment from the book that all science is potentially political. 

“All science is political in that science is incredibly expensive, and societies need to make a decision about how to allocate their resources,” Gordin said. “They decide that this is something we’re going to spend money on, and this is something that we’re not going to spend money on.” 

He pointed to Congress’ 1993 decision not to allocate further funds for a superconducting supercollider outside Waxahachie, Texas. “That was a political decision,” he said, “and it meant that, in the end, [the Higgs boson] was discovered in Geneva, not in Texas. That was a political decision based on allocation of resources.” 

Gordin continued: “The reason why I think people might get upset is they have a vision of politics as somehow dirtying science, and I don’t have that view of it. I think we’re all citizens in a polity.”

After their discussion, students lined up at microphones to ask questions, which ranged from how tobacco money had tainted scientific research in the 20th century to whether a decline in reading among young people might forestall scientific progress in the future. 

Gordin recognized two of the questioners — Emma Coulter and Nathaniel Voss — from his January trip to Dakar, Senegal, where Coulter and Voss had been doing Bridge Year service projects before coming to campus as first-year students. “It’s good to see you again,” he said from the stage.

The conversation between Gordin and the Class of 2029 will continue in coming weeks during smaller roundtable discussions in each of the residential colleges. 

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