Someone asked why pseu-skeps are so relentless in their refusal to believe anything new could happen. Let me try to put it in perspective. Pardon the merely personal in what follows.
I think we have to see this in a larger context. There's a guy who has been doing general relativity for many years. He's approaching - or may have reached - emeritus status at the University of Victoria in BC. His specialty is to investigate fundamental question of interpretation that arise in Einstein's theory. So, he's spent a great deal of time working in the very guts of that theory. His expertise is unquestionable. He's published dozens of papers. He's not going to make an elementary mistake at this late stage. The most salient issue in GR that distinguishes it as a field theory is non-linearity. This means that each situation is essentially sui generis - solutions must be had entire, and cannot be made up piecemeal from other, more elementary solutions, as one can in say electromagnetism. (Radios and TVs and cell repeaters work because electromagnetism is linear.) One day it dawned on Cooperstock to model a galaxy as an entire matter distribution and use the weakest approximation of GR that did not throw out the non-linearity. Amazingly, no one had ever done this, in spite of it being "right on the tip of the nose" to do so. When he solved the equations, an amazing thing happened - the rotation curve of the galaxy turned out to be highly non-Keplerian, and in fact he was able to easily match the observed rotation curves to his theoretical non-linear model. Now, the closest analogous system to GR is not field theory (EM, weak interaction etc). It is fluid flow - fluid dynamics. The Navier-Stokes equations that govern the motion of water, air, etc. are also non-linear. There is only one way to linearize them - to throw out viscosity, which leaves you with a fluid that is almost nothing like real world fluids. Essentially every interesting property of fluids is determined by viscosity. The lesson is - linearizing general relativity in order to apply computer models via addition of piecemeal solutions is guaranteed to produce non-physical results. Cooperstock retained the non-linearity in the weakest possible way, and immediately explained the rotation curves of galaxies. No need for dark matter. So here's your choice - you can believe in dark matter and say Cooperstock is full of it, and convince yourself that 90+ percent of the universe cannot be observed, or you can admit that it was a mistake to linearize GR in the case of medium-scale smeared-out matter distributions like a galaxy or a cluster of them, solve the equations, and explain the "anomalous" rotation curves. Which do you think is right? Of course the answer is completely obvious. An elementary blunder has been committed. But is absolutely impossible to convince anyone who will not be convinced, that errors were made. Many people see themselves as infallible, and incapable of error, like that sterilization satellite from Star Trek. They are understandably reluctant to admit errors, because they may melt down - maybe it's a good thing, because it would be hard to strap antigravs onto all the pathoskeps and beam them into deep space! So where does this attitude originate? My own personal belief is that it starts very early. We created an ultra-competitive science and math world in which those who progress are the ones with the largest and most fragile egos, and not those who are the deepest thinkers. The trueness or falseness of a thing is secondary to these competitors - what is important is to win. Anyone who has a real love for thinking and has been through an academic science program, particularly in the hard sciences, will remember many moments of utter disgust, because more often than not, the main purpose for doing science - a love for knowledge and the excitement of being on the frontier - is usually the last thing on the agenda. The pathoskeps are simply the products of a collectivization of what I call competitive mediocrity. The only way to always win is to have weak opponents. And so an entire system has emerged in which there is tacit agreement to not look hard, to ignore anomalies, to attack those who would question things and point out real problems. The mediocre-competitive have a tacit agreement among themselves to play a game they cannot lose. The worst example is Robert Park - a fulminating blow-hard who actually brags about his ignorance. Feynman warned us in his lectures about these people. No one listened to him either. There is no point in arguing with them. They are best ignored. Somehow a second culture of science has to be created, in which *they* are the outsiders. PS - a good read - "The Twilight of the Scientific Era" by Martin Lopez-Corredoira. -drl ----------------------------------------------- "I write a little. I erase a lot." - Chopin
