...it keeps the kooks out by being so conservative that even some legitimate breakthroughs may be squashed in the process. Unorthodox ideas will resurface time after time and if they're really up to it, they will eventually be accepted.
And who decides who is a kook and who not? People with vested interests in the status quo, People which have build a reputation and a living on old theories. If there is suddenly a person with a better theory, they have much to loose.
Yes, brilliant people will be ridiculed, careers will be wrecked and our understanding of the Nature grows painfully slowly. However, if it weren't so, in the end we wouldn't have science at all.
I say it again, ridicule has no place in science! Only because the ego of some people is in danger, science should be hold back? Sheesh...
Your last remark is patently absurd. Without this childish protection of owns pet theories, science would move much faster. Let experiments decide, which theory to keep and which theory to shred. Experiments and Reality, not someones ego.
No new theory should dismantle an old theory that has stood . The new theory can only be accepted if it naturally incorporates the old theory at some limit.
That is not how science should work. As another poster has put it, one counterexample and a theory is ripe for the dustbin. Like the aether-theory, put to rest by Michelson-Morley. Or the theory of the sun spinning around the earth, put to rest by Kopernicus. There will naturaly be examples where old theories will survive as limiting cases, like you said. But the greatest scientific successes were paradigm shifts, where a theory was replaced by a better theory.
As an introduction to that thought I recommend "The structure of Scientific Revolutions" from Thomas S. Kuhn. The problem nowadays is the enormous resistance to paradigm shifts, much more so than in the last two centuries. That is not surprising, as now are living and working more scientists as in all the millena before together. (And the most have vested interests.) There are also more "Kooks" than ever, and some of them are up to something...
There is a method that, when put bluntly, is like this: "If you put forward an extraordinary, off-mainstream hypothesis you've better a) come from a respectable university/research group, b) show some extraordinary, easily reproducible evidence for it too and c) get ready for some serious ad hominem bashing, ridicule and possibly loss of funds". It all comes with the territory.
And how, exactly, is that helping science?
The peer-review-process is badly broken. It only promotes ordodox science and the funding of already established old man.
Currently it takes two generations to accept a paradigm shift, to accept off-mainstream theories as better approximations of Reality.
Think were we could be if science would move forward much faster...
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And who decides who is a kook and who not? People with vested interests in the status quo, People which have build a reputation and a living on old theories. If there is suddenly a person with a better theory, they have much to loose.
Yes, brilliant people will be ridiculed, careers will be wrecked and our understanding of the Nature grows painfully slowly. However, if it weren't so, in the end we wouldn't have science at all.
I say it again, ridicule has no place in science! Only because the ego of some people is in danger, science should be hold back? Sheesh...
Your last remark is patently absurd. Without this childish protection of owns pet theories, science would move much faster. Let experiments decide, which theory to keep and which theory to shred. Experiments and Reality, not someones ego.
No new theory should dismantle an old theory that has stood . The new theory can only be accepted if it naturally incorporates the old theory at some limit.
That is not how science should work. As another poster has put it, one counterexample and a theory is ripe for the dustbin. Like the aether-theory, put to rest by Michelson-Morley. Or the theory of the sun spinning around the earth, put to rest by Kopernicus. There will naturaly be examples where old theories will survive as limiting cases, like you said. But the greatest scientific successes were paradigm shifts, where a theory was replaced by a better theory.
As an introduction to that thought I recommend "The structure of Scientific Revolutions" from Thomas S. Kuhn. The problem nowadays is the enormous resistance to paradigm shifts, much more so than in the last two centuries. That is not surprising, as now are living and working more scientists as in all the millena before together. (And the most have vested interests.) There are also more "Kooks" than ever, and some of them are up to something...
And how, exactly, is that helping science?
The peer-review-process is badly broken. It only promotes ordodox science and the funding of already established old man.
Currently it takes two generations to accept a paradigm shift, to accept off-mainstream theories as better approximations of Reality.
Think were we could be if science would move forward much faster...