The suggestion was made that disputes involving the real-world significance of scientific information could be settled by scientific judges chosen by the scientists who advocated the opposite sides of the issue. The idea initially sounded good to me because the core notion was honest. Smith was an expert who had worked in the field for years, knew the literature, and was certain he knew the truth. Jones was an expert who disagreed profoundly with Smith but was just as certain that he knew the truth. Neither could change the other’s mind, but the important point for the rest of us was how Jones and Smith knew what they thought they knew, and how well they could rationalize their views. What better procedure for finding the best answer than to have Smith and Jones go head-to-head under a reasonable set of procedural rules in front of disinterested, scientifically knowledgeable judges, and then ask the judges to decide the issue.

A Presidential task force was appointed to evaluate the practicality of the idea, which came to be called a science court. A sociology professor at Syracuse University named Allan Mazur was a member of the task force, and he proposed to me the possibility of starting a science court to resolve the question whether long-term exposure to the electromagnetic field produced by high-voltage powerlines was a risk to health. The plan was that I would be the proponent of one view, and an expert for the power companies would defend the opposite view. The judges would decide the question, specifying the reasons for their decision. Mazur sent letters to everyone that he thought might be interested in defending the point-of-view of the powerline companies, but each of their experts refused to participate in the proposed science court. The reason the power companies chose not to allow their experts to participate quickly became obvious. It would have been tactically unwise for the companies to provide me with a forum, like an incumbent senator running for reelection who declines an invitation to debate from his unknown-upstart opponent.

Only years later did I realize that the very idea of a science court was fundamentally flawed. Even if the power companies had made the tactical error of agreeing to the debate, and regardless of which side presented the better arguments, the idea of a science court was founded on the erroneous assumption that issues involving the societal impact of technical data should be decided by technical experts. That assumption is altogether inconsistent with the basic philosophical principal of our legal system that disinterested laymen rather than technical experts should judge the important factual matters that directly involve the interests of society. This principle applies to all factual matters, including health risks from powerlines, because scientists have no inherent warrant to form their own court for deciding scientific matters that directly impact laymen. The case would be otherwise in Plato’s theoretical Republic, but in our existential democracy we recognize that the level of imperfection and bias among experts is essentially the same as among laymen.