This March Ken Alder, professor of history and the Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, published a book titled “The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession.”

One of the book's central questions is: Why does that obsession, spurned by the rest of the world and most scientists, still live on in America today?

A prize-winning historian of science and the French Revolution, Alder questions society's seemingly most solid truths.

His earlier highly acclaimed book “The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World,” translated into 14 languages, tells the history of two astronomers who were sent on a mission to measure the Earth at the time of the French Revolution. Meant to define the length of the standard meter, their work inadvertently resulted in an erroneous measurement -- as well as a new understanding of error.

In his new book, Alder, a novelist who published his first book when he was 27, once again exhibits his deft writing style. “The Lie Detectors” offers a lively look at the main American players who pursued the dream of a mechanical device that would separate truth from deception.

“I'm interested in how a society takes things for granted -- in exposing the enormous conflicts in the past over the 'truths' that today are seen as self-evident and unproblematic,” Alder said in the following interview with Pat Vaughan Tremmel, assistant director of media relations.

Alder, who majored in physics at Harvard University and received his Ph.D. there in the history of science, also is the new director of the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program. Beginning this fall, the program will engage first-year students in an investigation of one of our culture's most enduring questions: What is the nature of “the good society”? 

Why is the lie detector not used anywhere else in the world?

Though the lie detector purports to get at the truth about what somebody is thinking, it really doesn't meet most scientific standards and has been repeatedly denounced by scientists.

Why does America insist upon using the lie detector?

Even though its results are not admissible in most criminal courts, Americans still persist in using the lie detector, particularly in pre-trial criminal investigations. One reason seems to be the enormous faith that Americans place in the machine's seemingly fair and honest way to assess truth. The machine seems to set aside the need for human judgment. This appeals to Americans' sense of fairness and equal treatment before the law. After all, what's fairer or more dispassionate than a machine?

Why is the lie detector unfair?

The lie detector feeds into a culture that values the public performance of the truth, as a sign of sincerity and authenticity. Because, in practice, operators using the machine have proved so adept at using it to get suspects to confess to crimes and because confession is the highest and supposedly final word on the truth, the lie detector seems to provide a “yes” or “no” answer to the question of a person's guilt or innocence. But a confession can be false. A person can feel guilty about things that he or she hasn't actually done. The process of measuring emotions and inferring from this a person's thoughts is a very fragile art.

Your book is basically about the lives of two men, who found and hawked what they thought was the perfect lie detector. Please explain.

The two main creators of the “science” of lie detection in the 1920s, John Larson and Leonarde Keeler, first worked together as collaborators in Berkeley under the auspices of police chief August Vollmer, himself the father of modern professional policing.  The two men shared Vollmer's ambition for the device, as a way to make the police themselves law-abiding by substituting scientific interrogation for the all-too-common practice of abuse, then known as the “third degree.” But when the two men moved to Chicago in the 1930s they fell out. That was mostly because Larson wanted to use the machine as a technique to explore the criminal psyche, and Keeler wanted to make the device into something that any police officer could use. In a sense, Larson tried to stay true to the scientific basis (however illusory) of the technique, and Keeler took the device in a more commercial direction. Keeler sold his service to business managers who wanted to vet the honesty of their employees and the U.S. government for use in a national security context. Larson could never reconcile himself to Keeler's success in making his patented “lie detector” the sort we have adopted in America to this very day.

What role does the lie detector play in the justice system?

Beginning in the 1920s and '30s, with gathering speed, most criminal cases have been resolved through a process of plea bargaining, then a relatively new form of justice that has come to dominate American jurisprudence, now resolving up to 90 percent of all criminal indictments. The lie detector came into its own within this new system as a sort of bluffing game. The threat of employing it increasingly was used to get people to confess to crimes.

In this latest book, your third, how did your experience as a novelist come into play?

My early work as a novelist probably helped me frame the story around the individuals who did so much to shape the design and methods of lie detection. The book is based on a large amount of archival research, and my willingness to do characterizations of the inventors certainly was influenced by my background as a novelist. But none of the details are made up; they come from history. And the story about the two men is meant to be representative of different conceptions of how the lie detector might have been thought to work.

What is the underlying theme of your work?

That science is a human enterprise, which very much depends on the passions and the commitments of the practitioners. In my work, I seek to show that there are multiple ways that science could have been developed. And the science of today is no tidier than the science of the past. Scientists themselves will tell you that science is a contentious field. It's competitive, divisive and there are no answers at the back of the book. 

I think it signified the end of the 20th Century.

-Professor Peter Hayes on the Fall of the Berlin Wall