Science & Tech Quote by Serge Lang

A mathematician’s impatience is doing more work here than the polite verb “object” suggests. Serge Lang is drawing a hard boundary: science is a practice of argument, evidence, and revision; law is a practice of procedure, precedent, and authority. When you try to settle scientific questions with legal tools, you don’t just pick the wrong instrument - you change the music. Courts are built to end disputes. Science is built to keep them open until reality closes them.

Lang’s line lands because it frames “legal approach” as a category error, not merely a bad tactic. A trial has winners and losers, fixed deadlines, and rules that reward persuasion under constraint. Scientific controversy often needs the opposite: messy replication, slow accumulation, and the willingness to say “we don’t know yet.” Put scientific behavior under a legal lens and you risk incentivizing defensiveness over candor, risk management over risk-taking, and institutional reputation over intellectual humility.

The subtext is also about power. Legal resolution can become a shortcut for administrators, funders, or governments who’d prefer a clean verdict to an ongoing, uncomfortable debate. Lang, who famously fought against what he saw as institutional policing of dissent in science (including battles around “scientific misconduct” mechanisms and the politics of epidemiology), is warning that due process can become a substitute for epistemic process.

It’s not anti-accountability; it’s anti-misclassification. Science can’t be litigated into truth. When it’s treated like a courtroom drama, the strongest evidence is no longer what survives reality, but what survives cross-examination.