In the interview, Mr. Deutsch said that Dr. Hansen had partisan ties “all the way up to the top of the Democratic Party,” and that he was “using those ties and using his media connections to push an agenda, a worst-case-scenario agenda of global warming.” He said that anyone who disagrees with Dr. Hansen “is labeled a censor and is demonized and vilified in the media — and the media of course is a willing accomplice here.”

Mr. Deutsch contended that although Dr. Hansen was a scientist, he wanted to talk about policy as well as science. “He wants to demean the president, he wants to demean the administration and create a false perception that the administration is watering down science and lying to the public,” Mr. Deutsch said. “And that is patently false.”

I suspect where things like dark matter is concerned, the world’s split into people who are confused because they haven’t looked into it, and people who are still confused because they have (Me, I’m in the former category – astrophysics looks like a fascinating field, but I ended up spending time on other things.)

The thing that really changed my world-view was Godel’s Theorem; I think anybody who goes into the sciences starts with a little spark of “with enough logic, anything is possible”, and GT shows that that’s not true – that some questions can never be answered by logic. I think that’s strangely wonderful; a friend of mine views it as a sort of personal affront.

At the same time, I think it *is* important to state that things are just theories sometimes. When we’re now having discussions about whether dark matter really exists because one guy has a new theory that accounts for gravitational shift without it but can’t account for the afterglow of the Big Bang while another guy announces he’s got specific scientific measurements about its weight and temperature for the first time, you can understand how students would get confused.

I still remember having an intense discussion in my loungeroom when I was about 22 with my best friend at the time who was studying History and Philosophy of Science. I ended up in tears when I had to concede my nice safe world of ‘known truths’ was tremulous and contingent.

But creationists like to muddy the waters – taking the ‘theory’ in ‘theory of evolution’ to imply a controversy that isn’t there – and Deutsch no doubt learned his science from that quarter.