Driving down to a science fiction convention in Colorado Springs a couple of weeks ago, we had a car parked in the passing lane at variable speeds. He almost caused one accident when someone cut in front of him to pass and he threw on the brakes and almost caused a pile-up. He never changed lanes no matter what, even after sort of unbelievable opportunities and suggestions (light flashing).
We coulnd't decide if he was drunk, or just an a-hole, until we did manage to pass him from the right lane. You guessed it already...on his cell phone.
Personal computers were not predicted (e.g., Apollo astronauts and Heinlein characters in the distant future all used slide rules). Flying cars -- where the F are they? Cloning becomes a possibility and politicians sit up as if they had no clue about it, and the public is pretty damn reactionary. People are miserable predictors of the future, especially when it depends on technological change.
Moreover, sf is really about just predicting the future and warning people about technological pitfalls. That's a narrow vision. It's a very unconstrained way of approaching a host of problems and issues that contemporary fiction may not be able to do. Philip K. Dick questions reality. Space colonization looks at new forms of government. Etc.
If you think the future is so clear, you need to work on your imagination. For instance, go compare predictions of the stripes of "peak oil" people to those who believe in the Vingean singularity and immortality in a couple of decades.
As an sf novelist, obvisouly I'm likely to disagree.
I think it's because the science in our culture is no longer fiction, all the choices have been made, and the scope of possible futures is narrowing rapidly as we zero-in on our final destination.
We're certainly living in an sf world, but an infinitesmal number of the choices have been made, and the scope of possible futures is still infinite.
It's somewhat telling that you only cite TV and movie science fiction. And I wouldn't even consider Star Wars science fiction at all. There are still great sf books being published. Please, pick some up and get excited about the possibilities the universe offers us. Download mine or one of Cory's for free to start.
I went to Clarion West back in 1994 and had a great time. Of my class of 20, 17 have published at least a short story at professional rates. About half have written or edited some sort of book. The more well-known writers include Andy Duncan (World Fantasy Award winner), Eric Nylund (writer of many novels, including HALO: FIRST STRIKE), and Syne Mitchell (three novels). I'm trying to finish my second. My wife Leah Cutter (Clarion West 1997) has her third novel coming out this spring from Roc.
I'm really proud of my class (and have some more information on my website about them). And I'm very supportive of the Clarion-style workshops. We have more quality science fiction and fantasy in the world because of them. Consider bidding in the auction!
The acoustic waves are moving through the plasma at the epoch of recombination at temperatures of about 3000 K. Knowing that, and the fact that yes, they do set up standing waves of a sort, let's us determine the rest. Wayne Hu at the University of Chicago has a great set of tutorial webpages explaining how this all works:
http://background.uchicago.edu/
I had the same attitude as you did a couple of years ago, and bought TaxCut. It sucked. I moved from one state to another, and it just plain couldn't handle it correctly (and boy did I try to make it but my fixes invalidated efiling). I went back to TurboTax, but switched to their on-line system. They did drop the snooping software after they lost business over it.
That is cool. There's a picture of the "Wow" signal in the book I mentioned above.
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 1
We honor and celebrate the robber barons of the last century who did similar, or much worse. Think about how many schools, museums, etc., bear the name Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.
Personally, I think you should criticize specific actions rather than the people themselves. Instead of saying "Paul Allen is bad, categorically" why not say "Paul Allen profited from Microsoft's unfair business practices" when the topic is relevent, and "Paul Allen is now doing some good and interesting things with his money."
I mean, if he's just so awful he could just hoard his money and do nothing useful with it all.
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 1
If I were rich, I actually think I'd be a lot like Paul Allen. I'd want to buy an NBA team, build expensive telescopes for astronomers, and open science fiction museums like he has.
I'm still waiting for Bill Gates to build a suit of Iron Man style armor so he can go fight crime and rival companies, but Marvel would probably just sue him.
Are Americans, or most people in the world, "hungry and unsheltered" because of a lack of money? I don't think so. Politics, and other issues, are the major obstacles. SETI, and astronomy in general, is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. It's ridiculous to prioritize the problems of the nation, or the world, and then apply all resources to solving the first one, then the second one, ad infinitum. That's not a wise thing to do.
One of the things that makes human civilization great, in my opinion, is that we care about this sort of knowledge. We value it for it's own sake. There are ways to determine the nature of the universe and our place in it. A culture that fails to look past its immediate physical needs of food and shelter is a short-sighted one that isn't any greater than a troop of babboons.
We are broadcasting...all the time. Military radar in particular produces a powerful, albeit directed, signal. This is called "leakage" in the SETI game, and we can detect Earth-type leakage out to some distance, but not as far as one would like. Furthermore, as we develop things like cable TV and other wired technologies and reserve broadcast airwaves for low-power activities like cell phones, our leakage diminishes. There may be a limited amount of time for a civilazation to be radio bright.
Most SETI experts believe that we're more likely to detect an advanced civilzation intentionally broadcasting rather than one leaking at our tech level, so that's what they've looked for first. And actually, we have sent out our own intentional broadcasts, the first being from Frank Drake in the 1960s toward a distant star cluster.
Lasers do have an intrinsic beam spread -- it comes out of their physics. That is, the beams are not perfect parallel rays. The exact numbers depend on the wavelength, the beam size, etc., but the odds are probably somewhat better than you're thinking. The strength of the approach is that a laser would be clear evidence for an extraterrestrial civilization and easy to pick out from natural sources.
A book recommendation and a name drop
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm currently reading a pretty good book on the Fermi paradox that includes a big chunk of material on SETI: If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb.
A few years ago, when I was observing quasars at Lick Observatory, I got to have dinner with Frank Drake (of Project Ozma and Drake equation "fame"). He was there working on the start of an optical SETI program. It was cool!
Hard science fiction, adventure, physics, astronomy, biology, artificial intelligence, and more good stuff like that. The hardcover has been available for a year, and the paperback will be out in a couple of weeks (right AFTER Christmas). I'm actually going to release Star Dragon in its entirety electronically at the end of the month as well. For more information and reviews (which were amazingly good), see my novel webpage. Thanks for checking it out!
Fact of the matter is most university types were educated far beyond their intelligence, and only the ones who couldn't succeed in the real world tend to make careers in academia.
Wow. What a "fact." Success in academic science is actually much harder than success in the "real world." I'll actually support my statement. Every year of my academic career, I've seen graduate students and post-docs forced out of science because they can't cut it intellectually, lack the necessary work ethic, or just can't find very-hard-to-get academic positions. Now, any given year I only know about a couple of cases personally, but over the last 10-15 years I've seen it many times.
And you know what? Pretty much every time these people go into the "real world" and find high-paying technical jobs quickly. I'm talking scientists now, people with physics/astronomy backgrounds.
Furthermore, few in science go into the "real world," fail, and come rushing back to "easier" academia. Pretty much the only new grad students from the "real world" coming back from advanced degrees are ones who have been very successful. Non-successful "real worlders" can't even get into decent grad schools.
You sometimes say some things that make sense, that I can agree with, then you go and make some outlandish statements that betray real hatred and a misunderstandingor ignorance of the subject at hand.
P.S. The ivory tower isn't so cloistered. It's just a different jungle.
Your original post has been moderated way down as trolling. Which it was. You just squawked about the politics of scientists in a very biased, inflammatory way without justifying your statements. There are scientists all across the political spectrum. I know fellow astronomers who went and got PhDs and faculty jobs despite protesting abortions on the weekends.
Most scientists DON'T CARE about the political leanings of other scientists as long as they do good rearch and back up their positions with experimental evidence. If you can't do that, you get torn apart. That's how it works. I've seen it. It can be ugly.
You haven't provided any serious evidence yet in support of your statements about science. Why don't you do some of that research before posting such extreme positions? The vast majority of scientists, in my experience as a scientist, do relentlessly pursue facts wheresoever they lead. If you think differently, justify that position or keep your mouth shut about things you're ignorant of.
I teach in a red state, by the way, at a state university. Science doesn't care what color your state is. Science cares about whether or not your ideas are supportable.
Period.
The media now...they seem to care about something else entirely, to the extent that they appear to care about anything. I'm a big fan of the original article. It's dead on. If the evidence and an overwhelming majority of scientists believe something is true, you don't trot on an opposing viewpoint to provide "balance." The truth isn't balanced. The truth is the truth, and everyone should be seeking it using the best methods available. Some questions are intrinsically complex, or wrapped up in issues other than science/truth, and that's fine. But it upsets me that they do a public a disservice by misleading people about what our species has learned about how the universe works. That should be criminal.
The reason, Scott, to have faith in science and scientists is that you're communicating with other people via a world-wide system of computers, that we've put men on the moon, that you can buy a ticket and fly to Europe and be there tomorrow, that you won't get polio, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. What of similar value has any religion/cult of choice given the world that we should have faith in it? World peace? Good will among men?
I'm familiar with Kuhn, and other similar works. You're misrepresenting/exaggerating those ideas, and not being critical. Scientists don't just up and decide to accept/not accept an idea based on social standing. Social issues can slow a correct idea, or slow the destruction of a wrong one. But the change happens because there is evidence. If cold fusion worked, we'd have cold fusion generators by now, despite what the scientific community thought about Pons and Flieshman. The Soviets supported Lamarkian inheritance, but not forever, because their science suffered over those years. Etc., etc.
I tend to agree with "Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." There is a certain percentage of scientists who get locked-on certain ideas and never change them despite new evidence, and later generations don't have a problem. That would seem to set the long-term upper limit at something like 35 years, the typically length of a scientific career. Still, they tend to be brushed aside long before they die and provide some friction, rather than a wall, to advancement.
I'd still claim that science moves a lot faster than politics or philosophy, and certainly some fields of science move lightning fast.
In my specialty, astronomy, we're to a great extent technology limited. Every major new advance in detector or instrument technology can mean dramatic new results. For instance, in the last ten years we've learned of over a hundred extrasolar planets when before we knew of none. We also learned that the universal expansion is accelerating, most likely the result of "dark energy" which we didn't even know existed. We've learned not only how to detect black holes in other galaxies, we've been able to measure their masses. And there are lots of other things as well, perhaps not so important, but that could become important.
How exactly has our understaning of philosophy or politics advanced in the last ten years>
I get my null results published in peer-reviewed journals, like everything else I work on. In this case, I was interested in trying to explain why the radio emission from the core of 3CR 68.1 was so weak in comparison to its overall radio brightness, and I hypothesized that it was due to free-free absorption . I got time on the Very Large Array in New Mexico to see if it was true, but the data indicated that it wasn't. It's still useful to publish because we didn't know before that the weakness of the radio core was not the result of absorption. Now, this may seem like a very specific small thing, but in order to get the telescope time and get the paper published, I did have to tie this all into a larger understanding of quasar unification and orientation effects. In a pure area of research like astronomy, economic relevance isn't an important criterion.
Concerning null results, however, you really do need to make an effort to publish them. Otherwise other scientists may waste time and money duplicating efforts that don't go where it seems they might.
I didn't say that scientists aren't frought with human frailties. I cleared stated they are, so why do you claim otherwise? Why lie about what I said just a few lines above?
I claimed that SCIENCE as an establishment is self-correcting and, in the long-term, unbiased. The media hyped up cold fusion, which is one of the things the linked article is all about, and the scientists themselves used a press conference to announce their results rather than a peer-reviewed journal. The vast majority of scientists didn't believe the claims and awaited experimental verification. That's how and why science works.
Over the long-haul, mountains of observational data will crush weak, but politically supported, scientific positions.
Are fradulent claims bad for science? Sure. Are they common? No way. Do they get smacked down when they can't be supported? Yes.
This is a nasty, unsupported statement. Journalists are trained to assimilate information fast, and to write well and fast. They aren't trained to be experts on all subjects, and they suffer from a changing landscape in which they must be more generalists. How many newspapers have dedicated science reporters these days? Not many. And those that do tend to have a single science reporter, as opposed to a team of reporters with expertise in different areas of science.
Scientists, on the other hand, focus on their own subject. I would be shocked if any layperson could "learn up hard" about astronomy and catch me up on any serious errors in my understanding of much of the field (I freely admit up front I don't do hardcore magnetohydrodynamic simulations).
And actually, if so many scientists have so many ideas that "go against what is blindingly obvious" then why must someone even "learn up hard" to realize this?
And many journalists decide what their story is going to be about before they do their research, which was a nice point about the linked article. They decided it's going to be about a black and white issue, and then shove everything into one of those two boxes. Or they decide my brother collected comic books to pay for college (true newspaper story, but not true).
I've had a few of my discoveries covered in the newspapers and even TV. They usually don't get them right, despite every effort. It kind of reminds me how we train high school teachers in education, and not so much in the subjects they teach. At the university level, subject experts teach classes even though few have education classes (that's another issue), and while our K-12 system is low ranked internationally, our higher education is considered among the best in the world.
While I wouldn't disagree that scientists are people and have their own particular biases, and that the game of science is certainly politically (in the general sense) I have to call crap on a lot of this woefully biased rant.
You're basically saying scientists are a bunch of leftist commie pinko fags, or words to that effect, so they are not to be believed. Yeah, everyone should believed that biased statement. At least scientists support their ideas with experiment.
The parent post makes the claim, without direct experience or other support in evidence, that only scientists proposing to advance "popular" notions get funded. That's pure bunk.
First off, what is "popular" in science is often popular because of large amounts of evidence that it is right. Should we spend millions of dollars on a project to show that the Earth is actually flat despite the "popularity" of other ideas? No, of course not. That would be stupid, not political.
Do some scientists perhaps torpedo competing points of view on review panels? Yeah, but not as much as the parent post seems to think. And when it does happen, it's usually a personal issue and not a political one.
The thing about SCIENCE, as opposed to scientists, is that it is apolitical. It's self-correcting. Tobacco companies funded their own pocket scientists at ridiculous levels, and science still managed to conclude that smoking is bad for people. Science also managed to conclude that continental drift happens, even though the idea was very unpopular.
I get upset when non-scientists rant about science in an uninformed way. The linked article was really great, coming from a non-scientist who had done some research. The parent post says "I am an agnostic on the Global Warming question because I know that the science is so screwed up I can't believe ANY of it" -- how does this non-scientist poster "know" this? There has been lots of research, and the majority of scientists in the field are not agnostic about it; they chracterize their uncertainty, quantitatively when possible.
Scientists LOVE to fund "unpopular" ideas when the proposers provide some evidence that they might be right. Overturning popular ideas is how new knowledge is developed. We actually don't like to fund refinements to standard models ad infinitum.
Now going back to my NSF proposal due Monday, especially worrying about how to play up its innovative aspects, which is a large part of the grading criteria.
Federal grants, in principle, don't suffer this issue, at least not significantly in most fields. Review panels for the NSF and other federal granting agencies are filled with expert scientists chosen by program officers who are themsevles scientists. Scientists will support astronomical surveys that say up front: "The most important results will probably be ones we cannot now predict."
I know. I've sat on several of these panels and ranked highly such proposals. Perhaps a field like astronomy that is basic research almost by definition has few political ramifications, but I don't think my colleages in biology, chemistry, etc., operate all that differently.
Similarly, there are granting agencies out there (like Research Corporation in Tucson, AZ) that do not have political or business agendas.
It's also disingenuous to claim that "almost no one is doing science just to see what might happen" when curiosity is what drives people to careers in science. If I knew how quasars really worked, I wouldn't be asking for money and telescope time! I pay attention to what the data tell me.
Null results are important to publish, too. I've published a couple...and have to admit that those are among my least cited papers.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone has an anecdote. Here's mine.
Driving down to a science fiction convention in Colorado Springs a couple of weeks ago, we had a car parked in the passing lane at variable speeds. He almost caused one accident when someone cut in front of him to pass and he threw on the brakes and almost caused a pile-up. He never changed lanes no matter what, even after sort of unbelievable opportunities and suggestions (light flashing).
We coulnd't decide if he was drunk, or just an a-hole, until we did manage to pass him from the right lane. You guessed it already...on his cell phone.
Personal computers were not predicted (e.g., Apollo astronauts and Heinlein characters in the distant future all used slide rules). Flying cars -- where the F are they? Cloning becomes a possibility and politicians sit up as if they had no clue about it, and the public is pretty damn reactionary. People are miserable predictors of the future, especially when it depends on technological change.
Moreover, sf is really about just predicting the future and warning people about technological pitfalls. That's a narrow vision. It's a very unconstrained way of approaching a host of problems and issues that contemporary fiction may not be able to do. Philip K. Dick questions reality. Space colonization looks at new forms of government. Etc.
If you think the future is so clear, you need to work on your imagination. For instance, go compare predictions of the stripes of "peak oil" people to those who believe in the Vingean singularity and immortality in a couple of decades.
I had to spend ten minutes explaining what quasars are to the security person!
But I actually like doing that sort of thing.
As an sf novelist, obvisouly I'm likely to disagree.
I think it's because the science in our culture is no longer fiction, all the choices have been made, and the scope of possible futures is narrowing rapidly as we zero-in on our final destination.
We're certainly living in an sf world, but an infinitesmal number of the choices have been made, and the scope of possible futures is still infinite.
It's somewhat telling that you only cite TV and movie science fiction. And I wouldn't even consider Star Wars science fiction at all. There are still great sf books being published. Please, pick some up and get excited about the possibilities the universe offers us. Download mine or one of Cory's for free to start.
I went to Clarion West back in 1994 and had a great time. Of my class of 20, 17 have published at least a short story at professional rates. About half have written or edited some sort of book. The more well-known writers include Andy Duncan (World Fantasy Award winner), Eric Nylund (writer of many novels, including HALO: FIRST STRIKE), and Syne Mitchell (three novels). I'm trying to finish my second. My wife Leah Cutter (Clarion West 1997) has her third novel coming out this spring from Roc.
I'm really proud of my class (and have some more information on my website about them). And I'm very supportive of the Clarion-style workshops. We have more quality science fiction and fantasy in the world because of them. Consider bidding in the auction!
That's EXACTLY the point of the article.
The acoustic waves are moving through the plasma at the epoch of recombination at temperatures of about 3000 K. Knowing that, and the fact that yes, they do set up standing waves of a sort, let's us determine the rest. Wayne Hu at the University of Chicago has a great set of tutorial webpages explaining how this all works:
http://background.uchicago.edu/
I had the same attitude as you did a couple of years ago, and bought TaxCut. It sucked. I moved from one state to another, and it just plain couldn't handle it correctly (and boy did I try to make it but my fixes invalidated efiling). I went back to TurboTax, but switched to their on-line system. They did drop the snooping software after they lost business over it.
That is cool. There's a picture of the "Wow" signal in the book I mentioned above.
We honor and celebrate the robber barons of the last century who did similar, or much worse. Think about how many schools, museums, etc., bear the name Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.
Personally, I think you should criticize specific actions rather than the people themselves. Instead of saying "Paul Allen is bad, categorically" why not say "Paul Allen profited from Microsoft's unfair business practices" when the topic is relevent, and "Paul Allen is now doing some good and interesting things with his money."
I mean, if he's just so awful he could just hoard his money and do nothing useful with it all.
If I were rich, I actually think I'd be a lot like Paul Allen. I'd want to buy an NBA team, build expensive telescopes for astronomers, and open science fiction museums like he has.
I'm still waiting for Bill Gates to build a suit of Iron Man style armor so he can go fight crime and rival companies, but Marvel would probably just sue him.
Are Americans, or most people in the world, "hungry and unsheltered" because of a lack of money? I don't think so. Politics, and other issues, are the major obstacles. SETI, and astronomy in general, is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. It's ridiculous to prioritize the problems of the nation, or the world, and then apply all resources to solving the first one, then the second one, ad infinitum. That's not a wise thing to do.
One of the things that makes human civilization great, in my opinion, is that we care about this sort of knowledge. We value it for it's own sake. There are ways to determine the nature of the universe and our place in it. A culture that fails to look past its immediate physical needs of food and shelter is a short-sighted one that isn't any greater than a troop of babboons.
We are broadcasting...all the time. Military radar in particular produces a powerful, albeit directed, signal. This is called "leakage" in the SETI game, and we can detect Earth-type leakage out to some distance, but not as far as one would like. Furthermore, as we develop things like cable TV and other wired technologies and reserve broadcast airwaves for low-power activities like cell phones, our leakage diminishes. There may be a limited amount of time for a civilazation to be radio bright.
Most SETI experts believe that we're more likely to detect an advanced civilzation intentionally broadcasting rather than one leaking at our tech level, so that's what they've looked for first. And actually, we have sent out our own intentional broadcasts, the first being from Frank Drake in the 1960s toward a distant star cluster.
Lasers do have an intrinsic beam spread -- it comes out of their physics. That is, the beams are not perfect parallel rays. The exact numbers depend on the wavelength, the beam size, etc., but the odds are probably somewhat better than you're thinking. The strength of the approach is that a laser would be clear evidence for an extraterrestrial civilization and easy to pick out from natural sources.
I'm currently reading a pretty good book on the Fermi paradox that includes a big chunk of material on SETI: If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb.
A few years ago, when I was observing quasars at Lick Observatory, I got to have dinner with Frank Drake (of Project Ozma and Drake equation "fame"). He was there working on the start of an optical SETI program. It was cool!
Hard science fiction, adventure, physics, astronomy, biology, artificial intelligence, and more good stuff like that. The hardcover has been available for a year, and the paperback will be out in a couple of weeks (right AFTER Christmas). I'm actually going to release Star Dragon in its entirety electronically at the end of the month as well. For more information and reviews (which were amazingly good), see my novel webpage. Thanks for checking it out!
Fact of the matter is most university types were educated far beyond their intelligence, and only the ones who couldn't succeed in the real world tend to make careers in academia.
Wow. What a "fact." Success in academic science is actually much harder than success in the "real world." I'll actually support my statement. Every year of my academic career, I've seen graduate students and post-docs forced out of science because they can't cut it intellectually, lack the necessary work ethic, or just can't find very-hard-to-get academic positions. Now, any given year I only know about a couple of cases personally, but over the last 10-15 years I've seen it many times.
And you know what? Pretty much every time these people go into the "real world" and find high-paying technical jobs quickly. I'm talking scientists now, people with physics/astronomy backgrounds.
Furthermore, few in science go into the "real world," fail, and come rushing back to "easier" academia. Pretty much the only new grad students from the "real world" coming back from advanced degrees are ones who have been very successful. Non-successful "real worlders" can't even get into decent grad schools.
You sometimes say some things that make sense, that I can agree with, then you go and make some outlandish statements that betray real hatred and a misunderstandingor ignorance of the subject at hand.
P.S. The ivory tower isn't so cloistered. It's just a different jungle.
Your original post has been moderated way down as trolling. Which it was. You just squawked about the politics of scientists in a very biased, inflammatory way without justifying your statements. There are scientists all across the political spectrum. I know fellow astronomers who went and got PhDs and faculty jobs despite protesting abortions on the weekends.
Most scientists DON'T CARE about the political leanings of other scientists as long as they do good rearch and back up their positions with experimental evidence. If you can't do that, you get torn apart. That's how it works. I've seen it. It can be ugly.
You haven't provided any serious evidence yet in support of your statements about science. Why don't you do some of that research before posting such extreme positions? The vast majority of scientists, in my experience as a scientist, do relentlessly pursue facts wheresoever they lead. If you think differently, justify that position or keep your mouth shut about things you're ignorant of.
I teach in a red state, by the way, at a state university. Science doesn't care what color your state is. Science cares about whether or not your ideas are supportable.
Period.
The media now...they seem to care about something else entirely, to the extent that they appear to care about anything. I'm a big fan of the original article. It's dead on. If the evidence and an overwhelming majority of scientists believe something is true, you don't trot on an opposing viewpoint to provide "balance." The truth isn't balanced. The truth is the truth, and everyone should be seeking it using the best methods available. Some questions are intrinsically complex, or wrapped up in issues other than science/truth, and that's fine. But it upsets me that they do a public a disservice by misleading people about what our species has learned about how the universe works. That should be criminal.
The reason, Scott, to have faith in science and scientists is that you're communicating with other people via a world-wide system of computers, that we've put men on the moon, that you can buy a ticket and fly to Europe and be there tomorrow, that you won't get polio, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. What of similar value has any religion/cult of choice given the world that we should have faith in it? World peace? Good will among men?
I'm familiar with Kuhn, and other similar works. You're misrepresenting/exaggerating those ideas, and not being critical. Scientists don't just up and decide to accept/not accept an idea based on social standing. Social issues can slow a correct idea, or slow the destruction of a wrong one. But the change happens because there is evidence. If cold fusion worked, we'd have cold fusion generators by now, despite what the scientific community thought about Pons and Flieshman. The Soviets supported Lamarkian inheritance, but not forever, because their science suffered over those years. Etc., etc.
I tend to agree with "Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." There is a certain percentage of scientists who get locked-on certain ideas and never change them despite new evidence, and later generations don't have a problem. That would seem to set the long-term upper limit at something like 35 years, the typically length of a scientific career. Still, they tend to be brushed aside long before they die and provide some friction, rather than a wall, to advancement.
I'd still claim that science moves a lot faster than politics or philosophy, and certainly some fields of science move lightning fast.
In my specialty, astronomy, we're to a great extent technology limited. Every major new advance in detector or instrument technology can mean dramatic new results. For instance, in the last ten years we've learned of over a hundred extrasolar planets when before we knew of none. We also learned that the universal expansion is accelerating, most likely the result of "dark energy" which we didn't even know existed. We've learned not only how to detect black holes in other galaxies, we've been able to measure their masses. And there are lots of other things as well, perhaps not so important, but that could become important.
How exactly has our understaning of philosophy or politics advanced in the last ten years>
I get my null results published in peer-reviewed journals, like everything else I work on. In this case, I was interested in trying to explain why the radio emission from the core of 3CR 68.1 was so weak in comparison to its overall radio brightness, and I hypothesized that it was due to free-free absorption . I got time on the Very Large Array in New Mexico to see if it was true, but the data indicated that it wasn't. It's still useful to publish because we didn't know before that the weakness of the radio core was not the result of absorption. Now, this may seem like a very specific small thing, but in order to get the telescope time and get the paper published, I did have to tie this all into a larger understanding of quasar unification and orientation effects. In a pure area of research like astronomy, economic relevance isn't an important criterion.
Concerning null results, however, you really do need to make an effort to publish them. Otherwise other scientists may waste time and money duplicating efforts that don't go where it seems they might.
I didn't say that scientists aren't frought with human frailties. I cleared stated they are, so why do you claim otherwise? Why lie about what I said just a few lines above?
I claimed that SCIENCE as an establishment is self-correcting and, in the long-term, unbiased. The media hyped up cold fusion, which is one of the things the linked article is all about, and the scientists themselves used a press conference to announce their results rather than a peer-reviewed journal. The vast majority of scientists didn't believe the claims and awaited experimental verification. That's how and why science works.
Over the long-haul, mountains of observational data will crush weak, but politically supported, scientific positions.
Are fradulent claims bad for science? Sure. Are they common? No way. Do they get smacked down when they can't be supported? Yes.
This is a nasty, unsupported statement. Journalists are trained to assimilate information fast, and to write well and fast. They aren't trained to be experts on all subjects, and they suffer from a changing landscape in which they must be more generalists. How many newspapers have dedicated science reporters these days? Not many. And those that do tend to have a single science reporter, as opposed to a team of reporters with expertise in different areas of science.
Scientists, on the other hand, focus on their own subject. I would be shocked if any layperson could "learn up hard" about astronomy and catch me up on any serious errors in my understanding of much of the field (I freely admit up front I don't do hardcore magnetohydrodynamic simulations).
And actually, if so many scientists have so many ideas that "go against what is blindingly obvious" then why must someone even "learn up hard" to realize this?
And many journalists decide what their story is going to be about before they do their research, which was a nice point about the linked article. They decided it's going to be about a black and white issue, and then shove everything into one of those two boxes. Or they decide my brother collected comic books to pay for college (true newspaper story, but not true).
I've had a few of my discoveries covered in the newspapers and even TV. They usually don't get them right, despite every effort. It kind of reminds me how we train high school teachers in education, and not so much in the subjects they teach. At the university level, subject experts teach classes even though few have education classes (that's another issue), and while our K-12 system is low ranked internationally, our higher education is considered among the best in the world.
While I wouldn't disagree that scientists are people and have their own particular biases, and that the game of science is certainly politically (in the general sense) I have to call crap on a lot of this woefully biased rant.
You're basically saying scientists are a bunch of leftist commie pinko fags, or words to that effect, so they are not to be believed. Yeah, everyone should believed that biased statement. At least scientists support their ideas with experiment.
The parent post makes the claim, without direct experience or other support in evidence, that only scientists proposing to advance "popular" notions get funded. That's pure bunk.
First off, what is "popular" in science is often popular because of large amounts of evidence that it is right. Should we spend millions of dollars on a project to show that the Earth is actually flat despite the "popularity" of other ideas? No, of course not. That would be stupid, not political.
Do some scientists perhaps torpedo competing points of view on review panels? Yeah, but not as much as the parent post seems to think. And when it does happen, it's usually a personal issue and not a political one.
The thing about SCIENCE, as opposed to scientists, is that it is apolitical. It's self-correcting. Tobacco companies funded their own pocket scientists at ridiculous levels, and science still managed to conclude that smoking is bad for people. Science also managed to conclude that continental drift happens, even though the idea was very unpopular.
I get upset when non-scientists rant about science in an uninformed way. The linked article was really great, coming from a non-scientist who had done some research. The parent post says "I am an agnostic on the Global Warming question because I know that the science is so screwed up I can't believe ANY of it" -- how does this non-scientist poster "know" this? There has been lots of research, and the majority of scientists in the field are not agnostic about it; they chracterize their uncertainty, quantitatively when possible.
Scientists LOVE to fund "unpopular" ideas when the proposers provide some evidence that they might be right. Overturning popular ideas is how new knowledge is developed. We actually don't like to fund refinements to standard models ad infinitum.
Now going back to my NSF proposal due Monday, especially worrying about how to play up its innovative aspects, which is a large part of the grading criteria.
Federal grants, in principle, don't suffer this issue, at least not significantly in most fields. Review panels for the NSF and other federal granting agencies are filled with expert scientists chosen by program officers who are themsevles scientists. Scientists will support astronomical surveys that say up front: "The most important results will probably be ones we cannot now predict."
I know. I've sat on several of these panels and ranked highly such proposals. Perhaps a field like astronomy that is basic research almost by definition has few political ramifications, but I don't think my colleages in biology, chemistry, etc., operate all that differently.
Similarly, there are granting agencies out there (like Research Corporation in Tucson, AZ) that do not have political or business agendas.
It's also disingenuous to claim that "almost no one is doing science just to see what might happen" when curiosity is what drives people to careers in science. If I knew how quasars really worked, I wouldn't be asking for money and telescope time! I pay attention to what the data tell me.
Null results are important to publish, too. I've published a couple...and have to admit that those are among my least cited papers.