At 07:12 pm 20/07/2005 -0400, you wrote:
>Grimer wrote:
>
>>I have to respectfully disagree with that statement. Suppose you observe
>>some scientific phenomena which only occurs once and you are the only
>>observer.
>
>If it only occurs once then it isn't scientific -- yet. You have to
>reproduce it. If you cannot reproduce it, then eventually you must conclude
>that you did not see it.
>
>Of course that only applies to subtle events that are difficult to detect.
>If you see a UFO land, and an extraterrestrial comes into your house and
>drinks tea with you, that's real. But such unique yet high-sigma events
>hardly ever happen to anyone.
>
>Before 1989, Mizuno and others saw events such as neutrons produced by
>palladium deuteride. In retrospect we now know that these events were real,
>and they were what you might call precursor indications, or hints, of cold
>fusion. However, at the time Mizuno did a lot of rooting around, checking,
>but he never imagined it might be cold fusion, so he dismissed the events
>as random electronic noise. You might say, he concluded he was mistaken,
>and he had not observed anything after all.
>
>Now you might call that head-in-the-sand, blind stupidity.
No, I would call it a missed opportunity, a lack
of confidence in his own judgement, a reluctance
to leave the herd. You no doubt know of the
psychology experiment where there are ten students
in a room, nine of which are in cahoots with the
examiner and the tenth who isn't. The examiner asks
a lot of questions and the nine answer honestly up
until a question comes up where they all lie. Even
though it is obvious the nine are lying most of the
tenth students finish up by agreeing with the other
nine.
Surely the scientists that the world needs are those
who have the courage of their own convictions even
though the whole world is against them - extrapolators
rather than interpolators. People who are prepared
to die for their beliefs if necessary. Kamikaze.
=======================================
Greater love than this hath no man than
he lay down his life for his friends.
=======================================
A scientist's first loyalty must be, not to academic,
professional, financial, advancement -
not to fame - but to Truth.
Simone Weil accurately summed up the situation that
science finds itself in.
=======================================================
What is disastrous is not the rejection of classical
science but the way it has been rejected. It is
wrongly believed it could progress indefinitely and
it ran into a dead end about the year 1900; but
scientists failed to stop at the same time in order
to contemplate and reflect upon the barrier, they did
not try to describe it and define it and, having taken
it into account, to draw some general conclusion from
it; instead they rushed violently past it, leaving
classical science behind them. And why should we be
surprised at this? For are they not paid to forge
continually ahead? Nobody advances in his career, or
reputation, or gets a Nobel prize, by standing still.
To cease voluntarily from forging ahead, any brilliantly
gifted scientist would need to be a saint or a hero,
and why should he be a saint or a hero? With rare
exceptions there are none to be found among the members
of other professions. So the scientists forged ahead
without revising anything, because any revision would
have seemed a retrogression; they merely made an
addition.
=======================================================
In short, the world needs more Malloves and fewer Porkers.
Frank Grimer
