This week on io9, we celebrate all the ways that science runs right up to the edge of the possible and laughs maniacally. What today seems like insanity, could tomorrow be the medicine that saves your life.
Since its inception, io9 has covered new scientific discoveries, as well as explaining older ones that you may not have learned about in school. We’ve told you about metamaterials that could one day make people invisible, and we’ve shown you ancient technologies and cities that are surprisingly modern. It’s all part of our secret agenda to fill your mind with questions about how the world works – and to make you smarter. We want science to fuel your speculations about the future, and inform your decisions in the present.
Still, we cannot help but notice that some science seems – well – just plain mad. What separates mad science from the sane kind? That’s what we’ll be exploring during io9’s mad science week.
Mad science can be anything from research that goes off the beaten path, to discoveries that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. At one time, evolution was mad science; so was plate tectonics. Both ideas were derided as crazy dreams by prominent scientists at the time they were first proposed. Now they are about as far from “mad” as you can get. Evolution and plate tectonics provide the foundations for our understanding of how life and the planet change over time.
What makes a scientist mad is her willingness to speculate and extrapolate. She isn’t enslaved to citations: She’s liberated by them; she transcends them and comes up with an idea that’s just so radical it might be right. Of course sometimes this radicalism leads to rule-breaking of the wrong kind. Our mad scientist journeys so far off the beaten path that she leaves morality behind too. The results can be horrible – history is full mad science gone evil, from the Tuskegee experiments, where black men infected with syphilis in the mid-twentieth century were allowed to die so scientists could watch the disease progress; to “rejuvenation” treatments where doctors implanted parts of rabbit testicles into ailing men’s scrota [PDF]. And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll look back at some of today’s pharmaceutical treatments as mad science gone evil too.
But most of the time, science gone mad is simply science properly understood. Good science should always involve a ruthless questioning of everything existing, especially “common sense” and “received wisdom.” While mad science depends on the foundations provided other scientists’ work, it also depends on the lessons of science fiction: Speculate and be free. That’s why mad scientists aren’t bounded by propriety or politics. They are only limited by ethics, their imaginations, and the laws of the physical world (unless they can come up with a way of changing those laws!).
So this week on io9, expect some serious madness. We’ll be bringing you features about science that will make your brain explode with mega-intelligence. You’ll learn about everything from crazy theories that turned out to true, to how you can manipulate other people’s sense of time using lessons from neuroscience. And of course we’ll bring you the very best in mad science fiction. We’ll have a mad scientist smackdown – vote for your favorite! – and stories about the greatest mad scientists ever to MWHAHAHA their way across the silver screen.
You can call us mad now, but one day our ideas might change the world!
