"The basis of that criticism was the then-common belief that thrust was produced by the rocket exhaust pushing against the atmosphere; Goddard realized that Newton's third law (reaction) was the actual principle."
It seems that you are unaware of the full story. What really happened to Goddard is something that anyone interested in scientific progress should know. See:
Yes, my point is that rocketry was considered to be pseudoscience for full 24 years. It wasn't. Having learned the historical lesson, the reasonable question is the following:
Which are the ongoing controversies that are currently considered to be pseudoscience, that will prove to be real science after all, just like what happened with rocketry, meteorites, radio waves, and bacteria causing ulcers?
A crackpot index, very cool! What would have been the crackpot index for Barry Marshall in the 1980s? Which is his crackpot index now?
Doctor Barry Marshall discovered in the 1980s that ulcers were caused by bacteria. To the medical community, such an idea “was like saying that the Earth is flat.” Hence, the evidence provided by Marshall was discounted. It wasn't until he infected and then cured himself that people started to listen. Since then, such a line of investigation has exploded, allowing for a breakthrough in understanding a causative link between bacteria and stomach cancer. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery.
You may want to be careful with the reason you are giving for calling an alternative paradigm "complete bullshit". It seems that you are overlooking the lessons from the historical record. We know for a fact that, when a new worldview replaces an old worldview, previously solved problems become unsolved again. This is exactly what happened during the most famous paradigm shift of all time: The Copernican Revolution.
"Accepting Copernicus would not simply replace one astronomical model with another. It also meant that a whole class of physics problems that had been considered solved were now suddenly unsolved. Therefore much of the initial resistance came from within the physics and astronomy communities rather than from the church."
"..."
"... Most astronomers also felt that the Ptolemaic system, although complicated, could ultimately be made to work. So while they hailed Copernicus's work and used his tables and methods, they were skeptical of his central idea of a moving Earth. They dismissed it as an ad hoc trick (much as Max Planck's quantum hypothesis was initially viewed centuries later) that turned out to be a useful tool for calculations. Thee idea that the motion described by some artificial model was a convenient fiction was not unprecedented. Ptolemy himself had said that not all of his epicycles had to be considered physically real. Some were to be thought of as merely mathematical devices that gave sound results."
"Initially, however, the Copernican system did not give better numerical results than the Ptolemaic."
Which kind of "pseudoscience" would you claim that this article is?
Is it pseudoscience like "Flat Earth Theory", or is it "pseudoscience" like rocketry? Have you studied the story of Robert Goddard?
Robert Goddard was an American engineer who pioneered the science of rockets, and has been called “The Father of the Space Age”. When he first proposed sending a rocket to the moon, he was ridiculed in a 1920 New York Times article because rockets allegedly violated the most basic laws of physics. The mistaken idea that a rocket flew by pushing against the air behind it was a common one that many scientists of the era believed, even when Goddard had demonstrated by experiment in 1915-16 that this was not so. Since 1920, Goddard was ridiculed many times by scientists, professors, journalists and policy makers. Goddard felt humiliated, and continued his rocket research away from the public eye. While US scientists continued to consider rocketry as what would today be called pseudoscience, German scientists were deeply interested in Goddard’s inventions. This ultimately led to V-2 German rockets—the first long-range guided ballistic missiles—raining down in London in 1944, resulting in the death of about 7,250 military personnel and civilians.
Such was the tragic end of Goddard’s full 24 years long ridicule, when “pseudoscience” was dramatically found to be real science after all. German scientists later admitted using Goddard’s pioneering ideas in the V-2 rockets design. A documentary on the subject remarked: “it was a final irony for a man labelled impractical by America's military leaders.”
Anyone who has spent the time to really follow the controversy about the existence and primacy of electricity in space will immediately understand that the controversy cannot be solved by getting a Ph.D. and "writing a new model". There are lots of deep patterns at play that are effectively blocking the possibility for a conceptual revolution, e.g. a complete replacement for Big Bang Creationism, i.e. the idea that the whole physical world actually “began” some time ago; the conservation-defying and hence unscientific proposition of the creation of all physical existence out of an “initial singularity” of “infinite density.”
Martin Corredoira is an astrophysicist and academic whistleblower. In his critique of academic research, The Twilight of the Scientific Age, he wrote:
"Creativity is blocked. It seems that the system gives the message that no ideas are needed. It seems the system, through its higher authorities, is saying that science only needs to work out the details. It is accepted that the basis of what is now known is correct, that present-day theories are more or less correct and only manpower is needed to sort out some parameters of minor importance. A Copernican revolution is totally unthinkable within the current system."
"Although the underlying equations governing plasmas are relatively simple, plasma behavior is extraordinarily varied and subtle: the emergence of unexpected behavior from a simple model is a typical feature of a complex system. Such systems lie in some sense on the boundary between ordered and disordered behavior and cannot typically be described either by simple, smooth, mathematical functions, or by pure randomness. The spontaneous formation of interesting spatial features on a wide range of length scales is one manifestation of plasma complexity. The features are interesting, for example, because they are very sharp, spatially intermittent (the distance between features is much larger than the features themselves), or have a fractal form. Many of these features were first studied in the laboratory, and have subsequently been recognized throughout the universe."
Re: "If dark matter is not real, please explain gravitational lensing."
There are many possibilites out there, but not one is being investigated by the establishment because the scientific academia is on a quest of proving textbook theory right, so there is no need to look for other possibilities. It is the approach of "settled science", where only the details are open to questioning, but the foundation is assumed to be sound and hence unquestionable.
One possibility is the one explored by Dr. Edward Dowdye, a laser optics engineer and former NASA physicist who argues the case for classical mechanics in attempting to explain observational quandaries that had hitherto remained the province of abstract theories like Einstein's Relativity.
See this presentation about the bending of light in the vicinity of massive objects:
He presents compelling empirical evidence that the direct relationship between light and gravitation in vacuum space does not exist. Crucially, he pointed out that when GRT was conceived, plasma was unknown, and the limb of the Sun was considered to be a boundary between the photosphere and the vacuum of space. Dr. Dowdye takes account of what is now known to be a plasma atmosphere surrounding the Sun to considerable altitude and applies Gauss's law of gravitation and conventional optics to the problem.
Please note that this is one of several possibilities that you will find if you look for them. It is clearly a controversy that must be carefully mapped out.
Re: "What dominates conversations is a complete lack of credible evidence for this."
Remember, IF electricity does flow through the cosmos, then the universe must be highly filamentary. This was predicted by plasma cosmologist Hannes Alfvén, see Cosmical Electrodynamics (1950).
I don't know if you ever heard about the Herschel Telescope. A very cool gadget.
"Observations with ESA's Herschel space observatory have revealed that our Galaxy is threaded with filamentary structures on every length scale. From nearby clouds hosting tangles of filaments a few light-years long to gigantic structures stretching hundreds of light-years across the Milky Way's spiral arms, they appear to be truly ubiquitous. The Herschel data have rekindled the interest of astronomers in studying filaments, emphasising the crucial role of these structures in the process of star formation."...
"One of the key aspects that emerged from these observations is the presence of a filamentary network nearly everywhere in our Galaxy's interstellar medium."
Don't be misled by rknop, and just follow the controversy.
1) The peer review system may be relatively satisfactory during quiescent times, but not during a potentially-revolutionary controversy occurring at the core of science, when the establishment seeks to preserve the status quo. Many science organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have recognized the very real peer review "gatekeeping problem", which effectively prevents scientific innovation. This observed anti-pattern blocking scientific progress occurs because peer review can be like a court where the party making judgment is the very party who stands to lose most if the application prevails.
2) The notion of an unobserved hypothetical dark matter was invented exactly *because* of the significant discrepancy between observed curves and the ones predicted by theory. If the galaxy rotation curves can be perfectly accounted for in terms of non-hypothetical visible matter, i.e. plasma matter in the laboratory, and simulated in government supercomputers by a leading plasma scientist and former scientific advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy, with plasma being more than 99.9% of the observed matter in the cosmos, then all this is clearly very significant.
3) Big Bang Creationism, with its intrinsic ties to General Relativity, was first penned by a priest (Lemaître), established with crucial help of a quaker (Eddington), and then praised by a Pope (Pius XII). As an engineer dealing with the Principle of Conservation in absolutely anything I do, I can only conceive the Big Bang as a modern creation story, not really science. In any case, if the Big Bang were a science (and hence a falsifiable theory), then it has been indeed observationally falsified, a great many times over. Anyone interested in scientific controversies should learn the story of Halton Arp. See:
4) You say that the idea of modelling cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas (the core idea behind the so-called Electric Universe) "is not something that is worth paying attention to." Actually, the only way to evaluate if a new view of the universe is worth paying attention to or not, is to suspend judgement and spend the time to understand the new perspective, and then to compare the new viewpoint with the old one. It is apparent that neither you or the "Rational Wiki" had spent the required time to immerse yourselves into the controversy. In fact, the whole "Rational Wiki" site is written with a profound ignorance of the subject of scientific controversies.
There is a fundamental difference between a healthy skeptical critical thinker, and an complacent apologist of the scientific status quo. If we want to promote scientific progress and innovation, we need more of the former and less of the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
The very same wikipedia that you are quoting explains that yes, that mistaken belief was common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The basis of that criticism was the then-common belief that thrust was produced by the rocket exhaust pushing against the atmosphere; Goddard realized that Newton's third law (reaction) was the actual principle."
It seems that you are unaware of the full story. What really happened to Goddard is something that anyone interested in scientific progress should know. See:
https://youtu.be/rwDnOLg0Nss
Yes, my point is that rocketry was considered to be pseudoscience for full 24 years. It wasn't. Having learned the historical lesson, the reasonable question is the following:
Which are the ongoing controversies that are currently considered to be pseudoscience, that will prove to be real science after all, just like what happened with rocketry, meteorites, radio waves, and bacteria causing ulcers?
A crackpot index, very cool! What would have been the crackpot index for Barry Marshall in the 1980s? Which is his crackpot index now?
Doctor Barry Marshall discovered in the 1980s that ulcers were caused by bacteria. To the medical community, such an idea “was like saying that the Earth is flat.” Hence, the evidence provided by Marshall was discounted. It wasn't until he infected and then cured himself that people started to listen. Since then, such a line of investigation has exploded, allowing for a breakthrough in understanding a causative link between bacteria and stomach cancer. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery.
You may want to be careful with the reason you are giving for calling an alternative paradigm "complete bullshit". It seems that you are overlooking the lessons from the historical record. We know for a fact that, when a new worldview replaces an old worldview, previously solved problems become unsolved again. This is exactly what happened during the most famous paradigm shift of all time: The Copernican Revolution.
See: http://joelvelasco.net/teachin...
"Accepting Copernicus would not simply replace one astronomical model with another. It also meant that a whole class of physics problems that had been considered solved were now suddenly unsolved. Therefore much of the initial resistance came from within the physics and astronomy communities rather than from the church."
"..."
"... Most astronomers also felt that the Ptolemaic system, although complicated, could ultimately be made to work. So while they hailed Copernicus's work and used his tables and methods, they were skeptical of his central idea of a moving Earth. They dismissed it as an ad hoc trick (much as Max Planck's quantum hypothesis was initially viewed centuries later) that turned out to be a useful tool for calculations. Thee idea that the motion described by some artificial model was a convenient fiction was not unprecedented. Ptolemy himself had said that not all of his epicycles had to be considered physically real. Some were to be thought of as merely mathematical devices that gave sound results."
"Initially, however, the Copernican system did not give better numerical results than the Ptolemaic."
Which kind of "pseudoscience" would you claim that this article is?
Is it pseudoscience like "Flat Earth Theory", or is it "pseudoscience" like rocketry? Have you studied the story of Robert Goddard?
Robert Goddard was an American engineer who pioneered the science of rockets, and has been called “The Father of the Space Age”. When he first proposed sending a rocket to the moon, he was ridiculed in a 1920 New York Times article because rockets allegedly violated the most basic laws of physics. The mistaken idea that a rocket flew by pushing against the air behind it was a common one that many scientists of the era believed, even when Goddard had demonstrated by experiment in 1915-16 that this was not so. Since 1920, Goddard was ridiculed many times by scientists, professors, journalists and policy makers. Goddard felt humiliated, and continued his rocket research away from the public eye. While US scientists continued to consider rocketry as what would today be called pseudoscience, German scientists were deeply interested in Goddard’s inventions. This ultimately led to V-2 German rockets—the first long-range guided ballistic missiles—raining down in London in 1944, resulting in the death of about 7,250 military personnel and civilians.
Such was the tragic end of Goddard’s full 24 years long ridicule, when “pseudoscience” was dramatically found to be real science after all. German scientists later admitted using Goddard’s pioneering ideas in the V-2 rockets design. A documentary on the subject remarked: “it was a final irony for a man labelled impractical by America's military leaders.”
Anyone who has spent the time to really follow the controversy about the existence and primacy of electricity in space will immediately understand that the controversy cannot be solved by getting a Ph.D. and "writing a new model". There are lots of deep patterns at play that are effectively blocking the possibility for a conceptual revolution, e.g. a complete replacement for Big Bang Creationism, i.e. the idea that the whole physical world actually “began” some time ago; the conservation-defying and hence unscientific proposition of the creation of all physical existence out of an “initial singularity” of “infinite density.”
Martin Corredoira is an astrophysicist and academic whistleblower. In his critique of academic research, The Twilight of the Scientific Age, he wrote:
"Creativity is blocked. It seems that the system gives the message that no ideas are needed. It seems the system, through its higher authorities, is saying that science only needs to work out the details. It is accepted that the basis of what is now known is correct, that present-day theories are more or less correct and only manpower is needed to sort out some parameters of minor importance. A Copernican revolution is totally unthinkable within the current system."
Plasma seems to be the quintessential complex system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Although the underlying equations governing plasmas are relatively simple, plasma behavior is extraordinarily varied and subtle: the emergence of unexpected behavior from a simple model is a typical feature of a complex system. Such systems lie in some sense on the boundary between ordered and disordered behavior and cannot typically be described either by simple, smooth, mathematical functions, or by pure randomness. The spontaneous formation of interesting spatial features on a wide range of length scales is one manifestation of plasma complexity. The features are interesting, for example, because they are very sharp, spatially intermittent (the distance between features is much larger than the features themselves), or have a fractal form. Many of these features were first studied in the laboratory, and have subsequently been recognized throughout the universe."
Re: "If dark matter is not real, please explain gravitational lensing."
There are many possibilites out there, but not one is being investigated by the establishment because the scientific academia is on a quest of proving textbook theory right, so there is no need to look for other possibilities. It is the approach of "settled science", where only the details are open to questioning, but the foundation is assumed to be sound and hence unquestionable.
One possibility is the one explored by Dr. Edward Dowdye, a laser optics engineer and former NASA physicist who argues the case for classical mechanics in attempting to explain observational quandaries that had hitherto remained the province of abstract theories like Einstein's Relativity.
See this presentation about the bending of light in the vicinity of massive objects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He presents compelling empirical evidence that the direct relationship between light and gravitation in vacuum space does not exist. Crucially, he pointed out that when GRT was conceived, plasma was unknown, and the limb of the Sun was considered to be a boundary between the photosphere and the vacuum of space. Dr. Dowdye takes account of what is now known to be a plasma atmosphere surrounding the Sun to considerable altitude and applies Gauss's law of gravitation and conventional optics to the problem.
Please note that this is one of several possibilities that you will find if you look for them. It is clearly a controversy that must be carefully mapped out.
Re: "What dominates conversations is a complete lack of credible evidence for this."
Remember, IF electricity does flow through the cosmos, then the universe must be highly filamentary. This was predicted by plasma cosmologist Hannes Alfvén, see Cosmical Electrodynamics (1950).
I don't know if you ever heard about the Herschel Telescope. A very cool gadget.
http://sci.esa.int/herschel/55...
"Herschel's Hunt for Filaments in the Milky Way"
28 May 2015
"Observations with ESA's Herschel space observatory have revealed that our Galaxy is threaded with filamentary structures on every length scale. From nearby clouds hosting tangles of filaments a few light-years long to gigantic structures stretching hundreds of light-years across the Milky Way's spiral arms, they appear to be truly ubiquitous. The Herschel data have rekindled the interest of astronomers in studying filaments, emphasising the crucial role of these structures in the process of star formation." ...
"One of the key aspects that emerged from these observations is the presence of a filamentary network nearly everywhere in our Galaxy's interstellar medium."
Don't be misled by rknop, and just follow the controversy.
1) The peer review system may be relatively satisfactory during quiescent times, but not during a potentially-revolutionary controversy occurring at the core of science, when the establishment seeks to preserve the status quo. Many science organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have recognized the very real peer review "gatekeeping problem", which effectively prevents scientific innovation. This observed anti-pattern blocking scientific progress occurs because peer review can be like a court where the party making judgment is the very party who stands to lose most if the application prevails.
2) The notion of an unobserved hypothetical dark matter was invented exactly *because* of the significant discrepancy between observed curves and the ones predicted by theory. If the galaxy rotation curves can be perfectly accounted for in terms of non-hypothetical visible matter, i.e. plasma matter in the laboratory, and simulated in government supercomputers by a leading plasma scientist and former scientific advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy, with plasma being more than 99.9% of the observed matter in the cosmos, then all this is clearly very significant.
3) Big Bang Creationism, with its intrinsic ties to General Relativity, was first penned by a priest (Lemaître), established with crucial help of a quaker (Eddington), and then praised by a Pope (Pius XII). As an engineer dealing with the Principle of Conservation in absolutely anything I do, I can only conceive the Big Bang as a modern creation story, not really science. In any case, if the Big Bang were a science (and hence a falsifiable theory), then it has been indeed observationally falsified, a great many times over. Anyone interested in scientific controversies should learn the story of Halton Arp. See:
https://plus.google.com/+Chris...
4) You say that the idea of modelling cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas (the core idea behind the so-called Electric Universe) "is not something that is worth paying attention to." Actually, the only way to evaluate if a new view of the universe is worth paying attention to or not, is to suspend judgement and spend the time to understand the new perspective, and then to compare the new viewpoint with the old one. It is apparent that neither you or the "Rational Wiki" had spent the required time to immerse yourselves into the controversy. In fact, the whole "Rational Wiki" site is written with a profound ignorance of the subject of scientific controversies.
There is a fundamental difference between a healthy skeptical critical thinker, and an complacent apologist of the scientific status quo. If we want to promote scientific progress and innovation, we need more of the former and less of the latter.