One of our readers sent in a letter basically saying that because Einstein never really could bring himself to accept quantum mechanics, we can dismiss theoretical physics.

Before I retired, I discovered that it is in fact theoretical physics which has become a fairy tale, since Bohr, Heisenberg and Born succeeded in 1927-1930 in painting Einstein as an old crank who in his old age just could not accept new ideas anymore.

Now here is the thing – what Einstein did, or had done to him in his old age is in fact completely irrelevant. Much like how Newton ended up going off the deep end into alchemy, if Einstein became an old crank – it wouldn’t actually change the importance of General Relativity.

And you see this in current science too. If we were to dismiss Francis Collins on genetics on the basis of some of the stuff at Biologos, then quite frankly we would lose very valuable knowledge. We cannot expect scientists, even great ones, to be right about everything.

This is because what actually matters with science is not who said it, but what was said. If we were to dismiss scientific ideas on the basis of their originators degenerating into cranks – we would lose most of the scientific knowledge we have today.

I haven’t read Hawkings’ book, so this is not a defense of him. I don’t know what his reasoning really is, all I know is what the wires have provided me with – his assertions. I am not saying he is right here.

But you cannot dismiss an entire field basically on the grounds that any given scientist was made a fool of, you have to deal with the body of work.