I see a little more social identity theory at work in the popular prints this weekend. A consultant for the usually estimable journal New Scientist, writing in yesterday’s Guardian has suggested that scientists suffer from an inferiority complex.

Mr. Brooks must meet scientists of a very different kidney to those whom I am privileged meet in my peregrinations. I find these people quite the opposite, in fact I would go so far as to say that our laboratories contain many whose years of study, reading and research have produced people most secure in their intellects and, when you enquire further with enormous personal and cultural hinterlands outide their scientific life. A scientist can venture into the literature, art and music and go way beyond the mere dilleante. As science becomes ever more complex and costly, the reverse is not true.

Scientists are intensely aware of the boundaries of their work, indeed it would be irresponsible of them not to be, but that does not equate to a feeling of inferiority. Sceintists are some of the cleverest people around, and they know it, but they do not claim to have the cures for all the ills of the world in ther lab coat pockets as Mr Brooks seems to suggest many think they have.

To bolster his somewhat tenuous case, Mr Brooks joins other journalists in apostrophizing the Large Hardron Collider. As dinosaurs are fascinating to children because they are large, terrifying and extinct, the Large Hadron Collider exerts an almost hypnotic attraction to journalists because it is large, very expensive, will do something way beyond their comprehension and has been constructed people who are, in the words of the Daily Telegraph’s Scientific Prognosticator ‘clever clogs’. The risk of it creating black holes has been underestimated, it seems by a minute amount of interest only those interested in the minute fractions of a minute amount.

Mr Brooks states some truths that scientists would not dispute: ‘Science is not the arbiter of truth. All it can do is offer opinions about the answers to certain questions that we ask of nature. And it reserves the right to revise those opinions in the light of future discoveries.’

Indeed. He then loads both barrels of his fowling piece, takes careful aim and shoots himself squarely in the foot:

‘Even mathematics loses touch with any notion of truth once it steps into the real world. Last May, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany, warned that financial systems were operating in dangerous territory because traders were transferring their naive notions of the truth of mathematics on to the “black box” models used to predict and control trading.’

So, a mathematician warns that those erroneously applying mathematics for their own ends risk the failure of that enterprise.

‘A few months later, we all found out just how dangerous that territory was.’

Were I that mathematician I would not be feeling inferior, I would be feeling rather vindicated. I would also question whether the current world financial crisis can be laid solely at the feet of mathematicians, which is what Mr Brooks seems to imply.