On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
> Joshua Cude wrote: > > >> > Contrary to popular argument, science actually celebrates novelty and >> > revolution, and scientists are not afraid of disruptive experiments; >> they >> > crave them. > > > This is complete bullshit. Most scientists neither fear nor celebrate > disruptive experiments. They do not give a damn how disruptive a result is, > or how much it appears to violate theory. They care about one thing, and > one thing only: > > FUNDING. Money. Status. Power. > > As Stan Szpak says, scientists believe whatever you pay them to believe. > Nice broad brush indictment which is mostly wrong. Consider Jonas Salk as an example -- he gave the world the Salk polio vaccine without royalties and without a patent. He went on to be immensely successful simply because he was a great man, a superb scientist, an accomplished scholar, and a humanitarian. There are many like him. Maybe not enough but many. > If the plasma fusion people had not been around in 1989, we would have > cold-fusion powered aircraft by now. The only reason there was resistance, > and continues to be, is because those people are making 6-figures for > screwing the taxpayers, and they do not want the gravy train to stop. > The main reason there are no cold fusion powered aircraft is because when you ask for a robust demonstration that runs a long time, you get referred to papers that are hard to read and understand, even with related backgrounds, and don't really answer the key questions of measurement reliability and data quality. Instead of a gadget on a desktop that anyone can test, you get complex coordinate graphs with unclear labels done by poorly specified methods and not replicated by independent others. At least that's most of what I've seen before I stopped reading.
