Observations on weird science

Imagine that the whole edifice of scientific inquiry was built on wobbly foundations and that pretty much everything we hold to be true is open to doubt. Imagine that the world wasn’t four and a half billion years old: imagine that it was new.

In fact, there is no need to imagine, because if the central thesis of the controversial Australian physicist Professor Henry Simpkins in a startling new book, 6,000 Years Young: Why the Earth Is Not Really That Old at All, is right, then nothing we believe is true.

Over doughnuts and coffee, I ask how has he come to such a startling and scientifically counter-intuitive conclusion. “Radishes,” Simpkins says, looking up from his chocolate doughnut, part of which has stuck to his chin.
“Radishes?” I reply.
“Yes, radishes,” he repeats.
“The radish is unique among root vegetables in being a remarkable reservoir of strontium-90. I am not the first to measure this, but I am the first to realise the potential.

It is,” he says through the froth of his coffee, “the most important scientific discovery ever.”
When the professor first outlined his theory, he was thrown out of the University of Wallamalong, New South Wales. The university subsequently claimed that Simpkins was actually a janitor and not a professor in the physics department (a claim he energetically refutes). Other Australian universities similarly denied Simpkins a platform or, indeed, a cleaning job.

Undaunted, Simpkins turned his attention to the book that is now bringing him so much attention, not all of it positive. One critic has called it “an odious fiction dressed up as science but actually the babblings of an unbalanced mind that only the terminally charlatan or deeply dishonest could possibly take seriously”.

It doesn’t surprise Simpkins that the liberal Establishment is disturbed by the challenge that the book offers the received wisdom of what he calls “time-ist” science. “My research represents a threat to certain people and institutions,” Simpkins points out punchily.

“Of course, they ridicule me.”

Nature magazine called him “a goggle-eyed loony”. Certainly the halo of wild ginger hair, the dotted bow tie and the trails of custard and ink down the front of his shirt give Professor Simpkins a passing resemblance to the mad scientist of comic cliché. But to me, his eyes are those of a man struggling to contain huge excitement. For Simpkins knows, as a piece of doughnut flies out of his mouth and into mine, that the world will never be the same again.

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