Peter Hadfield

Peter Hadfield (born 1 July 1954) is a British freelance journalist and author, trained as a geologist, who runs the YouTube channel Potholer54, which has over 233,000 subscribers.

He has previously lived in Japan, and now lives in Australia.

Peter Hadfield's father was a noted child psychiatrist, Dr. Ian Hadfield.

Hadfield has a degree in geology from Kingston University.

Hadfield wrote a weekly humour column for The Mainichi Daily News (the English edition of the Japanese-language Mainichi Shimbun) while living in Japan.

He was The Sunday Times correspondent in Tokyo from 1988 to 1990, then wrote a regular column for the Daily Mail on life in Japan.

Later he became Tokyo correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph and U.S. News & World Report.

He was also the Tokyo correspondent for New Scientist for 14 years.

His writing has appeared in other publications, such as the BBC News website , USA Today, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The South China Morning Post and The Lancet.

In 1991 Hadfield became Far East correspondent for Monitor Radio, and reported throughout East Asia.

During this period, Hadfield wrote and appeared on screen regularly as a correspondent for CNN, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), ABC News (U.S.) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

Hadfield's book, "Sixty Seconds that Will Change the World," about the potential implications of an earthquake in Tokyo, was published by Sidgwick & Jackson in 1991.

A second revised edition was published by Pan and Tuttle in 1995 after the Kobe earthquake.

In 1995, Hadfield was one of a group of reporters at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (FCCJ) that interviewed Tatsusaburo Suzuki, a lieutenant colonel in the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) who had served during World War II as the IJA's liaison to the Japanese nuclear weapons programme, about the activities and progression of Imperial Japan's nuclear programme over the course of the war.

Hadfield published an article about Suzuki's revelations in New Scientist that same year.

On 13 January 2024, fearing the potential that the FCCJ could one day become defunct, Hadfield uploaded the full interview to his YouTube channel, where he also expressed dismay about what he saw as the time wasted on by amateur tabloid reporters who did not understand science that asked Suzuki to explain basic facts about nuclear physics to them.

More recently, he has contributed regularly to the CBC, NPR, and BBC radio programmes Costing The Earth, Science in Action, The World Tonight, Outlook and East Asia Today, as well as the ABC's Science Show.

Hadfield, known on YouTube as "Potholer54" and "Potholer54debunks", has made videos about various scientific topics, such as the science behind global warming, the age of the Earth and debunking arguments used by young Earth creationists to claim the Earth or universe are young, and for videos on how tricks of the trade in journalism can be used to fool viewers.

In March 2010 Hadfield penned an opinion piece on his YouTube series for The Guardian.

Hadfield has attacked the pseudoscience of created kinds, also known as baraminology, being highly critical of the creationist preacher Kent Hovind for rejecting phylogenetic taxonomy in favour of it.

Hadfield argues that baraminology is unscientific because it starts off with the predetermined conclusion that the Bible is correct and distorts science to fit with it.

In one of Hadfield's videos, he shows how creationists like Hovind misrepresent scientific papers to claim that radiocarbon dating does not work.

Hadfield showed how Hovind dishonestly used studies that detailed the unreliability of radiocarbon dating in marine organisms such as seals and molluscs to denounce radiocarbon dating as useless in all instances.

In reality, radiocarbon dating is inaccurate in marine organisms because they do not directly uptake carbon-14 from the air but from marine carbonates, the production of which causes isotopic fractionation that alters the quantity of carbon-14 in the sample.

Hovind was also lambasted by Hadfield for conspiratorially asserting that palaeontologists would refuse to radiocarbon date non-avian dinosaur bones because they had predetermined that they must be too old for radiocarbon dating.

Hadfield sarcastically exclaimed that palaeontologists would not carbon date it because "THERE'S NO FUCKING CARBON IN IT!"

and showed that Hovind himself acknowledged this earlier when he said that the carbon in dinosaur fossils was replaced by minerals.

Hadfield has been highly critical of the supposed separation between experimental and historical science advocated by creationist Ken Ham.

Hadfield accused Ham of working backwards from his conclusion, arguing that his entire modus operandi is to distort scientific facts to fit his beliefs, and explained that this distinction is an entirely arbitrary differentiation designed so that Ham can reject any scientific theories and disciplines that conflict with his religion and deem them false.

Hadfield later demonstrated that Ham himself accepts information about extinct animals such as Triceratops gained from observations and inferences that are derived through what Ham deems "historical science".

Hadfield also mocked the creationist suggestion that the banana was intelligently designed by God to fit in a human hand that was put forward by Ray Comfort; Hadfield lampooned Comfort for not knowing that the fruit had been selectively bred and genetically engineered over the course of human history.

Hadfield referred to the concept of a crocoduck invented by Kirk Cameron "laughable", explaining that ducks and crocodiles were part of completely different lineages that shared a most recent common ancestor in basal archosaurs that evolved in the Early Triassic, long before either birds or crocodylomorphs emerged as distinct clades.

Hadfield ridiculed Chuck Missler for thinking that the theory of evolution predicted that life would spontaneously spring into existence in a jar of peanut butter.

Firstly, Hadfield points out that Missler is referring to abiogenesis, which he erroneously synonymises and lumps together with evolution.

Secondly, Hadfield refers to scientific evidence showing that the conditions in which the first life arose were very different from those in a sealed jar of peanut butter, making Missler's thought experiment irrelevant.

Hadfield has frequently derided creationists for misunderstanding natural selection.

In a notable example, he showed how Buddy Davis created a straw man of palaeontologists believing that dinosaurs' survival instinct caused them to evolve feathers so they could fly.

In reality, the mutations that caused the development of feathers arose randomly and were then selected for due to being beneficial for survival.

Hadfield lampooned the creationist belief of Billy Crone that the Earth must be only a few thousand years old because the Earth's magnetic field would have melted the Earth's crust after just 20,000 years and that it would have vapourised the Earth if Earth were even a million years old.

Hadfield showed how Crone believed this because he read that the Earth's magnetic field has decayed since the 19th century and mistakenly inferred that it must have been excessively high in the past and continuously decayed over time.