THE CRIME OF REASON

And the Closing of the Scientific Mind
By Robert B. Laughlin
Nobel Laureate in Physics

Many Americans believe that we live in an "Information Age" and that in our modern, technological world, information is more freely available and flows faster than ever before. But Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Laughlin sees a deeply troubling problem behind the mounting volumes of advertising and spam: an increasing sequestration of valuable knowledge.

In his new book, THE CRIME OF REASON: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind (Basic Books; October 1, 2008), Laughlin argues that we are collectively relinquishing our intellectual rights and that certain aspects of knowledge are already disappearing from the public discourse, because they are either deemed too dangerous or because they are intellectual property. "Courts now sustain patent claims for hiring strategies, real estate sales techniques, the discovery of chemical correlations in the body, and gene sequences," he writes. "Broad areas of two sciences, physics and biology, are now off-limits to public discourse because they are national security risks. Indeed, the Information Age should probably be called the Age of Amnesia because it has meant, in practice, a steep decline in public accessibility of important information."

Even worse are the many forces that are conspiring to make acquiring information a danger or even a crime. Increasingly, the right to learn and understand - what many Americans consider to be a basic human right - is in jeopardy. "More and more," writes Laughlin, "the 'flash of insight' that we so admired in Galileo and Newton - the sudden understanding of a thing and its implications - is turning out to be a patent infringement or a state security danger. More and more, the act of reasoning something out for yourself is potentially a crime."

Drawing on examples from nuclear technology, biowarfare, circuit design, genetics, cryptography and software patents, Laughlin dispels common misconceptions related to knowledge and reason. He explains why technical and non-technical knowledge are not fundamentally different, and why nuclear knowledge shouldn't be separated into a special category of dangerousness all its own. "Knowledge is knowledge," he writes. "Once we accept that some of it is too important for ordinary people to have, we are no longer at Orwell's doorstep but sitting together in his parlor discussing proper placement of the furniture."

Laughlin believes that an unresolved conflict between economic stability and security on the one hand and human rights on the other is at the heart of our collective ambivalence toward the criminalization of learning. "We demand strong ownership principles for economic well-being and strong state censorship of certain things for safety," he notes. At the same time, we also understand that limiting an individual's access to learning is immoral. Laughlin speculates that ultimately the thirst for freedom to understand - not the need for economic opportunity - will be what finally drives young people to leave the earth generations from now. "The real story is not about technology at all, or even the future, but about ourselves," he concludes.

Through carefully documented arguments, THE CRIME OF REASON offers a grim view of the direction we are headed if we continue to allow knowledge to be sequestered.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert B. Laughlin is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Physics at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1985. Prior to that, he worked as a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1998, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect. He has also won the Oliver E. Buckley Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics, and the Department of Energy's Earnest O. Lawrence Award for Physics. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His previous book, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, was published by Basic Books in 2005. He lives in Stanford, California. http://large.stanford.edu

ABOUT THE BOOK

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