We usually associate collective irrationality with mysticism and various crazed cultish forms of belief. By contrast, since the enlightenment, science has been viewed as almost embodying reason itself.
There are plenty of fanciful doctrines in philosophy and social theory that could be seen as forms of collective irrationality, where systems of belief in the intellectual world completely fly in the face of empirical reality or have little basis in firm empirical support. But can collective irrationality also be displayed in the hard sciences?
It can, and was, on several occasions during the past century. Collective irrationality in the sciences is usually seen as a feature of totalitarian regimes. There was the Stalin-era Lysenko affair in biology, 'Aryan physics' in Nazi Germany, and mad 'Mao Tse Tung Thought' style particle physics during the cultural revolution.
Sometimes, this type of collective irrationality can work. For instance a group of Japanese physicists who tried to prove Karl Marx's philosophy of 'dialectical materialism' actually made some important discoveries in our understanding of the strong nuclear force in the 1950s. Alas they went off the rails thereafter.
But scientific irrationality is not linked exclusively to doctrinaire ideology. It would appear that a more market-driven collective irrationality, based around fashion, has emerged in the science world. This relates to a contentious line of theory known as 'superstring theory'.
One of the enduring goals of theoretical physics is the marriage of Einstein's general theory of relativity — a theory of gravity — with quantum mechanics. Gravity is the weakest force but operates over large scales, so it is crucial to understanding some of the bigger things in life, such as the universe as a whole. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, accounts for the micro-world.
It is hoped that the consummation of this marriage, 'quantum gravity', would unify physics and provide us with new insight into the underlying laws of nature. Some even hold out the promise of a 'theory of everything', because we would thereby combine our best theories of the very big and the very small into one neat package.
But it has been a calamitous and rocky courtship. Even Dexter, the robot who yielded his compatibility algorithm on the dating game show Perfect Match, would struggle! Every attempt at unification results in ugly mathematics that spews out nonsense and anomalies.
Superstring theory is the most popular theory aimed at unifying physics. It has had a