The Sunday Morning Post: ‘Science Is the Belief in the Ignorance of Experts’

The people who built the technology we rely on were often crazy, wrong, or both.

Galvani's Frog Legs Experiment #1

None of this should exist. Not the machine on which I type these words. Not the screen on which you read them. Not the temperature-controlled room you might be reading in, nor the servers warehousing this page of text. All of these things rely on electricity and batteries. And if you subscribe to the idea that humans can only invent what they first understand, electricity has no business existing in the first place.

In the late 1700s, the two dominant ideas about electricity came from two strange men, each in possession of his own fallacy. Alessandro Volta, a physics professor in Lombardy, believed that electricity was born inside the friction between nearby metals. Luigi Galvani, a physician in Bologna, believed that electricity emanated from the bodies of animals. To prove this point, he killed an obscene number of frogs. Galvani chose the little amphibians “because their nerves are easy to locate and their muscular contractions, which continue for up to forty-four hours after their death, are easy to see,” the author Tim Flannery wrote in a sensational essay in The New York Review of Books. Flannery continues, gruesomely:

Galvani’s laboratory was at times festooned with decapitated, disemboweled, and bisected frogs hanging from wires attached to their nerves. A jolt of electricity or even a hand touching one of the wires would create a gruesome pantomime of frog corpses executing demi-pliés.

Eventually Galvani realized that the frogs’ legs would flex even when quite distant from any electrical current. This led him to believe that the current causing the muscles to twitch must come from within the corpse itself—and the concept of “animal electricity” was born.

Both Volta’s and Galvani’s names have been immortalized as modern words: voltage, galvanize. But both were profoundly wrong about their work.

In the 1780s, Galvani popularized the notion that electricity could only be drawn out of the living. If electricity seemed to reanimate life, the theory went, perhaps it was because electric currents were born inside the body. Volta decisively proved Galvani wrong with the invention of the first electric battery, the Voltaic pile, which made use of neither frogs nor any other poor creature. With a stack of copper, zinc, and cardboard disks soaked in saltwater, Volta’s little machine allowed electricity to be stored and deployed at will for the first time.

Volta’s ideas about batteries and electric forces borrowed heavily from Benjamin Franklin. The founding father had experimented with electricity, most famously with his lightning rod, but it was Volta who crystallized Franklin’s enthusiasm for electric technology into the construction of a working battery. In fact, Volta nurtured several projects born inside the mind of America’s great renaissance man. His other famous contribution to science was his recognition of methane gas, which built on a Benjamin Franklin paper on “flammable air.” The American icon kept tossing lob passes across the Atlantic Ocean, for which Volta provided alley-oop after alley-oop.

Although the Voltaic pile worked well enough, the inventor did not understand his invention. Volta believed that electricity was summoned into existence by a chemical reaction that took place when two metals came into close contact. It wasn’t for several decades that another scientist, Michael Faraday, overturned this illusion. With an Einstein-like gift for imagining how invisible forces orchestrate the universe, Faraday showed that electricity and magnetism are linked by fields that fill space. Like Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, or Prometheus, Faraday’s discovery came at significant personal cost to his mind and body. A few years after he articulated the principles of electric and magnetic fields, Faraday succumbed to a breakdown that some historians attribute to a combination of burnout from his dyslexia, mercury poisoning, and madness. In 1840, Faraday took an extended vacation with his wife, who reported that he did nothing but sleep, eat, and walk up to 15-hours a day. Faraday never fully recovered. For the next decade he suffered from “receding of the gums, loosening of the teeth, and frequent sore throats [which] could very easily have been mercury related.” From this sorry skull poured pure magic. Modern wireless communication, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, are made possible by Faraday’s revelation that electric and magnetic grids radiate around us rather than emanate from copper stacks or frog legs.

Luigi Galvani’s useful wrongness about electricity led in stranger directions. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, inherited “the family research project” of shocking animals corpses, Flannery writes.

In 1803 [Aldini] was invited by the Royal College of Surgeons in London to demonstrate on the body of the newly hanged murderer George Forster. Aldini attached wires to the corpse's ears, running current from a voltaic pile, and the jaw began to quiver. Then Forster's left eye opened so he appeared to give a ghastly, lewd wink. One observer, a Mr. Pass, was so disturbed by what he saw that he promptly went home and died.

These experiments might sound familiar. The plot of Frankenstein, first published in 1818, seems to directly refer to Aldini and the ghastly experiments he inspired among other continental scientists. “Many and long were the conversations [about electric science experiments] between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener,” Mary Shelley once wrote. “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.” By the mid-1800s, one might have said this for Galvani’s poor frogs: If they didn’t die for science, they died for art, serving as literary inspiration for one of history’s most famous horrors.

This era of weird electric experiments, with its winking corpses and twitching cadavers, discredited the idea of animal electricity for generations. It’s only in the last few decades that bio-electricity staged a comeback. In her book We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds, Sally Adee writes that we are on the cusp of a revolution in biology and electricity that would have impressed, if not entirely surprised, Galvani and Aldini. Most everyone knows about defibrillators, which became widely available in the 1950s and have since shocked millions of people back to life by reanimating stalled hearts. But the last decade has brought new advances in electric brain implants, including Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which are making strides for spinal-damaged patients and people with Parkinson’s disease. In 2024, scientists showed how harmful bacteria, like Salmonella, navigate the gut by following electric signals in our stomach tissue. The findings suggest that changing bioelectric signatures in the gut could help us design new medicines to combat bowel inflammation. The science of the human electrome will likely go much further, Flannery writes:

It turns out that every tissue type generates its own distinctive voltage. Fat cells generate around −50 millivolts relative to their surrounding extracellular fluid, skeletal muscle −90, and skin cells −70. Cancer cells emit an unmistakable electrical signal.

We owe our electric age to scientists who were crazy, ignorant, or both. In his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman writes that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I used to hate this quote for its entreaty to conspiratorial thinking. After all, if scientists automatically distrusted every expert opinion, how would truths coalesce? How would knowledge accumulate over time? Wouldn’t we all just claim our own private reality in the face of expertise? But it’s the following lines from Feynman that make his point clear. “When someone says 'science teaches such and such', he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach it; experience teaches it.” In other words, science is the opposite of blind faith. It is a reflexive skepticism toward received wisdoms or arguments from authority. It is the conviction that our own experiments, if carefully constructed, can reveal once-obscured truths. Science is a special kind of faith—a belief before evidence that the previous generation’s “truths” are, at best, half-truths, with half-lives, which will one day pass away and make room for the next generation of even more useful half-truths.

So, this is how electricity was born. Alessandro Volta built the first electric battery by acting on the conviction that Luigi Galvani was wrong. Three decades later, Michael Faraday discovered the principles that power the modern economy by proving that Volta was wrong. A century after that, scientists built defibrillators and electric brain implants by proving that, well, you know all those people who said Galvani was wrong? Actually, they were wrong, too. Science is not about getting things right. It’s about getting things wrong, and wrong, and wrong again, and from this cavalcade of wrongnesses overturned, a useful thing sometimes emerges. The machine on which I’m writing these words, the machine on which you’re reading them: You and I are bound by electricity, by invisible fields, by a legacy of twitching frogs and copper stacks, and by the ignorance of experts.