Three decades ago – in May 1995 – the British-born mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson published an article in the New York Review of Books. Entitled “The scientist as rebel”, it described how all scientists have one thing in common. No matter what their background or era, they are rebelling against the restrictions imposed by the culture in which they live.

“For the great Arab mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam, science was a rebellion against the intellectual constraints of Islam,” Dyson wrote. Leading Indian physicists in the 20th century, he added, were rebelling against their British colonial rulers and the “fatalistic ethic of Hinduism”. Even Dyson traced his interest in science as an act of rebellion against the drudgery of compulsory Latin and football at school.

“Science is an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes,” he wrote. Through those acts of rebellion, scientists expose “oppressive and misguided conceptions of the world”. The discovery of evolution and of DNA changed our sense of what it means to be human, he said, while black holes and Gödel’s theorem gave us new views of the universe and the nature of mathematics.

But Dyson feared that this view of science was being occluded. Writing in the 1990s, which was a time of furious academic debate about the “social construction of science”, he feared that science’s liberating role was becoming hidden by a cabal of sociologists and philosophers who viewed scientists as like any other humans, governed by social, psychological and political motives. Dyson didn’t disagree with that view, but underlined that nature is the ultimate arbiter of what’s important.

Today’s rebels

One wonders what Dyson, who died in 2020, would make of current events were he alive today. It’s no longer just a small band of academics disputing science. Its opponents also include powerful and highly placed politicians, who are tarring scientists and scientific findings for lacking objectivity and being politically motivated. Science, they say, is politics by other means. They then use that charge to justify ignoring or openly rejecting scientific findings when creating regulations and making decisions.

Thousands of researchers, for instance, contribute to efforts by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to measure the impact and consequences of the rising amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet US President Donald Trump –speaking after Hurricane Helene left a trail of destruction across the south-east US last year – called climate change “one of the great scams”. Meanwhile, US chief justice John Roberts once rejected using mathematics to quantify the partisan effects of gerrymandering, calling it “sociological gobbledygook”.

In the current superheated US political climate, many scientific findings are charged with being agenda-driven rather than the outcomes of checked and peer-reviewed investigations

These attitudes are not only anti-science but also undermine democracy by sidelining experts and dissenting voices, curtailing real debate, scapegoating and harming citizens.

A worrying precedent for how things may play out in the Trump administration occurred in 2012 when North Carolina’s legislators passed House Bill 819. By prohibiting the use of models of sea-level rise to protect people living near the coast from flooding, the bill damaged the ability of state officials to protect its coastline, resources and citizens. It also prevented other officials from fulfilling their duty to advise and protect people against threats to life and property.

In the current superheated US political climate, many scientific findings are charged with being agenda-driven rather than the outcomes of checked and peer-reviewed investigations. In the first Trump administration, bills were introduced in the US Congress to stop politicians from using science produced by the Department of Energy in policies to avoid admitting the reality of climate change.

We can expect more anti-scientific efforts, if the first Trump administration is anything to go by. Dyson’s rebel alliance, it seems, now faces not just posturing academics but a Galactic Empire.

The critical point

In his 1995 essay, Dyson described how scientists can be liberators by abstaining from political activity rather than militantly engaging in it. But how might he have seen them meeting this moment? Dyson would surely not see them turning away from their work to become politicians themselves. After all, it’s abstaining from politics that empowers scientists to be “in rebellion against the restrictions” in the first place. But Dyson would also see them as aware that science is not the driving force in creating policies; political implementation of scientific findings ultimately depends on politicians appreciating the authority and independence of these findings.

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Freeman Dyson: the visionary thinker and maverick scientist who challenged authority

One of Trump’s most audacious “Presidential Actions”, made in the first week of his presidency, was to define sex. The action makes a female “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and a male “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell”. Trump ordered the government to use this “fundamental and incontrovertible reality” in all regulations.

An editorial in Nature (563 5) said that this “has no basis in science”, while cynics, citing certain biological interpretations that all human zygotes and embryos are initially effectively female, gleefully insisted that the order makes all of us female, including the new US president. For me and other Americans, Trump’s action restructures the world as it has been since Genesis.

Still, I imagine that Dyson would still see his rebels as hopeful, knowing that politicians don’t have the last word on what they are doing. For, while politicians can create legislation, they cannot legislate creation.

Sometimes rebels have to be stoic.