The End of the Debate

I made a passing comment in my last entry, "no one needs to say 'the debate is over' when the debate is really over". A friend of mine responded by asking, "Why is that? What ends a debate?"

Well, the physicist Max Planck said the debate is over when all the people on one side are dead.

Seriously though, debates end in many ways. Sometimes debates end when action is taken – a nation launches a war or passes a law. Sometimes they end when one side is ridiculed or arrested. Sometimes they end Planck's way. In 1997, I had an opportunity to observe the end of a scientific debate up close; it was an excellent example of how debates should end – when there is overwhelming evidence on one side. That argument was about the location of gamma-ray bursts – enormous explosions in outer space. At the time, astronomers did not know whether they occurred inside our own galaxy or farther away. That debate ended when scientists discovered a burst with a slowly fading afterglow. The afterglow was in a distant galaxy.

After that, there wasn't a whole lot of discussion about the debate being over. The gamma-ray community just got on with the business of figuring out what causes the bursts.

When you do hear the phrase "the debate is over", someone is usually trying to end a debate that is very much alive. Recently we've seen this in the controversy over whether global warming is man-made. Al Gore, for instance, said in a 2006 interview "If you look at the peer reviewed scientific literature, the debate is over." The former Vice President can say that all he wants, but here we are three years later and prominent scientists continue to publish their skepticism in peer-reviewed journals (for a partial list, look up "scientists opposing global warming" in Wikipedia). I hope that this debate, like the gamma-ray burst debate, will be settled by evidence, and not by one side's premature attempt to declare it over.

The Logic Critic gives Al Gore…

1 Blade - Not even an argument.