Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
He generally treats the silence that ultimately results from experts in the field, after attempts to answer Krivit's often hostile questions, as proof of stonewalling and the expert having something to hide. See how he treated the ENEA researchers over his own silly error in not realizing that 10 x 10^n is equal to 1 x 10 (n + 1).
That was a serious blow. A lot of researchers heard about it. (Not from me, by the way.) Krivit lost a lot of credibility. Even if he were to apologize now it would still leave a bad impression in the minds of many people. I would be surprised if anyone at the ENEA will have anything to do with Krivit, ever again. Many scientists have professional pride, and they do not easily forgive this kind of insult.
It is a silly error, but the repercussions from not owning up to it are not silly, and not trivial. People who make a living with numbers -- scientists and programmers -- judge you harshly when you fail to admit you are wrong about a black-and-white, factual issue like this one. It is like mixing up helium and hydrogen and not admitting you were wrong.
I sometimes make embarrassing elementary mistakes in arithmetic. (As alert readers here may have noticed, ahem.) I would never fail to own up to it, immediately! Of all the mistakes you can make, none are more obvious than this.
(By the way, people a little older than me who mastered the slide rule told me it was good training to avoid stupid order-of-magnitude errors, because the decimal point was in your mind alone. Around 1975, I bought one of the first calculators, for about $150 as I recall, and I have been churning out numbers without checking ever since.)
This could all stop in a flash. What it would take is "Oops! I lost it there!"
The damage to his credibility is not going away in a flash. It is a darn shame, because his publication and book have many merits. He put a lot of hard work into them. But if you cannot trust someone to correct a simple mistake in arithmetic, how can you trust them to report on complicated experiments and even more complicated theories?
- Jed
