A trusting soul over at lenr-forum.com wrote that science does not exclude different thinking, meaning it does not reject valid ideas:
Seriously, look over those accomplishments and tell me science excludes > different thinking. With some example such as: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/oct/12-most-important-science-trends-30-years We have often discussed this issue here. There is no need to reiterate the whole issue but let me quote my response. If you have not read Hagelstein's essay linked to below, you should. There are countless examples of "science" excluding different thinking. This is what prompted Max Planck to write that progress in science occurs "funeral by funeral." He explained: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” I have mentioned famous examples of rejection. They include things like the airplane, the laser and the MRI. I put the word science in quotes above because it is not science that excludes so much as individual scientists who do. They do this because rejecting novelty is human nature, and scientists are ordinary people with such foibles despite their training. See Peter Hagelstein's essay here, in the section, "Science as an imperfect human endeavor:" http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Hagelsteinontheoryan.pdf Many scientists not very good at science, just as many programmers write spaghetti code, and many surgeons kill their patients. A surprising number of scientists reject the scientific method, such as the late John Huizenga, who boldly asserted that when an experiments conflicts with theory, the experiment must be wrong, even when he could not point to any reason. One of the absurd claims made with regard to this notion is that science never makes mistakes; that in the end it always gets the right answer and it never rejects a true finding, so no valuable discovery is ever lost. Since many claims have been lost and then rediscovered decades later this is obviously incorrect. More to the point, this claim is not falsifiable. If a true discovery is lost to history *we would not know about it*. Because it is lost. The logic of this resembles the old joke about the teacher who says, "everyone who is absent today please raise your hand." In other technical disciplines such as programming, people forget important techniques all the time. The notion that science does not make mistakes is pernicious. It is dangerous. Imagine the chaos and destruction that would ensue if people went around thinking: "doctors never make mistakes" or "bank computer programmers never make mistakes" or "airplane mechanics never make mistakes." - Jed
