For years, we've heard the derogatory term "pointy-headed intellectual" applied to academics who, it is claimed, are so steeped in theory that they have lost contact with real-world facts and evidence, and denounce or deny anything that doesn't seem to agree with their theories.

Honestly, I haven't encountered many academics who deserve this characterization. Academic theories live or die in constant competition, with objective validation as the judge.

But if you really want to find excellent examples of pointy-headed intellectuals, you need look no further than the realm of politics.

Far too many of our political candidates, elected officials, and their most ardent supporters are so committed to extreme liberal or extreme conservative ideology (theories or models of society and the economy) that they view any opposition as being, not simply wrong, but positively evil -- to be opposed at all costs.

That's why it's so difficult for them to compromise and deal effectively with our most pressing problems.

As a physicist, I know something about theories and models. In fact, I love them!

Theories and models are essential to the progress of science and technology. Useful theories enable us to "understand" why huge collections of seemingly unrelated observations are actually just consequences of a few fundamental principles.

If you bother to learn just three simple rules -- Newton's Laws of Motion -- then you can understand everything there is to know about billiard ball collisions, things falling from tall buildings, car crashes, satellite orbits, gyroscopes -- essentially anything that involves physical mass and motion.

Newtonian mechanics makes an otherwise incomprehensible mess of facts not only comprehensible, but actually simple and coherent. Suddenly, the world makes sense!

But is Newtonian theory true, or correct? No. In fact, it is dead wrong. It is based on provably mistaken concepts of space, time, and matter.

If you try to use Newton's laws to predict the behavior of electrons, for example, you get nonsense: The electrons don't do what Newtonian mechanics predicts they "should" do.

Unlike politicians, when physicists found this disagreement between their most reliable and beloved theory and reality, they didn't insist the electrons were wrong. They modified their theory.

Even theories about simple things can never be proved to be correct. They can only be proved incorrect (falsified), and it takes only a single fact that is at odds with the theory to falsify that theory.

The best thing we can say about a successful and useful theory is that it has worked so far, and we have no currently known exceptions. Finding exceptions and falsifying theories is so valued in the scientific world that Nobel Prizes have been awarded for just that.

The realms of social organization, human behavior, and the economy are so vastly more complex than mass, space, and time, that there is no possibility we will ever have a tidy theory that is even remotely as successful or useful as the (now falsified) Newtonian mechanics.

Anyone with the faintest powers of observation can easily find counterexamples that falsify every ideological "ism" ever conceived by the minds of humans. That most definitely includes doctrinaire versions of both "liberalism" and "conservatism."

That's why the pointy-headed intellectuals who boast or value ideologically perfect voting records are so dangerous. They have stopped thinking, and turned their brains over to the dogmatic defense of easily falsifiable theories, when what we need are people who are able to make reasonable compromises and find pragmatic solutions.

In the coming elections, I hope the voters will keep this in mind, and replace as many dogmatic pointy-headed intellectuals as we can identify. They are wrecking the country, and they are wrecking Wisconsin.

Wiley, who decided in December to step down as chancellor at UW-Madison, will return to teaching this fall as a professor in the department of educational leadership and policy analysis and at the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs.