How to Settle the Science: Ban an Applied Mathematics Textbook
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all. (Hypatia)
In the early 21st century, the expression “The Science Is Settled” became commonplace. At the time, it was used most often to force people to believe in the theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW), now rebranded as Climate Change, although the term “settled science” could be applied to any branch of science with an accepted dominant paradigm.
With reference to CAGW, not all scientists were in agreement with what was being stated at the time, nevertheless most acknowledged the existence of a greenhouse effect caused by the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide on Earth, as initially proposed by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927). The latter deservedly received the Nobel Prize in 1903 for his theory that in an aqueous solution, i.e., in water, dissolved salts separated into positively charged ions (cations) and negatively charged ions (anions). Nevertheless, Arrhenius was also a strong supporter of scientific racism, being a leading member of the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene and a co-founder in 1922 of the State Institute for Racial Biology.
The Swedish mathematician, Claes Johnson, Emeritus Professor in Applied Mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan = Royal Technical highschool), took a different route. Johnson has written extensively with different co-authors on “a unified approach to computational mathematical modeling using differential equations based on a principle of a fusion of mathematics and computation”1 He has also carefully studied thermodynamics and published his own critiques of Boltzmann, Planck and others, a topic that deserves multiple posts. As a result, Johnson rejects the theory of the greenhouse effect; naturally, it follows that nor does he believe in a runaway greenhouse effect as a result of human activity.
In support of a new Master’s programme in Simulation Technology at KTH, Johnson began the preparation of a new book, called BodyAndSoul: Mathematical Simulation Technology2, and made it available online for a course being given by another lecturer in the Fall 2010 session. This book, still available online (see the footnote below), is a massive tome that completely reorganizes the teaching of mathematics, including calculus and linear algebra, by incorporating numerical computation right from the beginning. And, in this book, among the 227 chapters and 1693 pages, there are a total of 5 chapters covering 34 pages that are somehow related to the topic of CAGW.
But those 34 pages were too many as far as the authorities at KTH were concerned, so the book was banned while the course was being given, even though none of those 5 chapters was being used for that course. The details of the process can be followed in detail by looking at Johnson’s series of blog posts, with entries from November 2010 to October 2015, with the tags KTH-gate, KTH-gate2 and KTH-gate3. Some of these posts are written in English, others in Swedish.
A quick summary of what happened can be found in his post Banned Books and Freedom of Information. The following key actions took place:
media-campaign by KTH describing the book as “totally unacceptable”,
deletion of the link to the book on the course homepage by the CSC-dean, against the will of the teacher and without motivation, thus making the unpublished book inaccessible,
acknowledgment to the media by the KTH-president that the book was “replaced”,
denial of any form of banning and deletion by the KTH-facultydean.
Johnson writes in that same post:
We find no evidence of banning and censorship of math books after Kepler and Galileo; the ban on the heliocentric theory was lifted in 1743. It seems that the ban by KTH of my math book is unique in modern time.
It is quite possible that the ban of Johnson’s book was not just because of ideas deemed to be unacceptable with respect to the theory of CAGW. Johnson, in writing this book, which essentially replaces the first two years of a typical applied mathematics undergraduate program in the Western world, was openly criticizing the direction that mathematics has taken since the end of the 19th century. I wish that such a book had been available when I was an undergraduate student.
Johnson belongs to a growing body of mathematicians who believe that the infinitesimal calculus was invented for the purpose of calculation, and that the computer is ideally suited to do this work. However, for this goal to be achieved, then any notion of actual infinity must be removed from the discourse, as computers can only manipulate finite objects. For Johnson, this goal is in fact that of Leibniz. As a result, he has created a new site, entitled the Leibniz World of Math: new school mathematics for the digital world. Johnson writes:
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) invented both Calculus as the mathematics of change of the scientific/industrial revolution and the Computer, which together form the basis of today’s Digital World as Digital Calculus.
I have not read in detail Johnson’s work on thermodynamics, so cannot competently assess what he has written. However, it is not by simply banning material deemed undesirable by a set of bureaucrats or politicians that science is to advance. Science ultimately is the search for the truth about how the Universe in which we live is organized, and this endeavour can only take place in an atmosphere of free debate. Researchers such as Claes Johnson deserve our full support.
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K. Ericsson, D. Estep, P. Hansbo, C. Johnson. Computational Differential Equations. Cambridge University Press, 1996. p.xi.
Claes Johnson. BodyAndSoul: Mathematical Simulation Technology. Draft, 9 June 2010. https://www.dropbox.com/s/mbw3xjabwbjwlet/bodysoul%202.pdf?dl=0
Incredible story. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks John, This is a very interesting and enlightening story, like all your posts. I didn't realize that Climate Change or back then "Global Warming" theories were that old.