Blah blah blah Quantum Mechanics blah blah blah Synchrodestiny blah blah blah Conciousness blah blah blah Seeking blah blah Essence…

@kuhnigget: I agree a good bicker can be fun…in a somewhat frustrating way.

Stick around for when the UFO nutters show up if you want a real lesson in frustration.

“Established science is simply what has already been accepted. That doesn’t stop people from researching seemingly outlandish hypotheses.”

It does if you can’t get funding.

But if your idea is seemingly outlandish and you have data to indicate that it’s a real phenomenon, and if it stems logically from what is already firmly established, then there is no bar to getting funding.

Or did you fail to grasp HvP’s analogy about the tree?

I never said they appear out of a vacuum and I never said mainstream science was boring. The mainstream is by its very nature, well, mainstream. And the innovations come from people who take that mainstream and turn it upside down. It’s like Picasso. he had to know the basics of painting before he could veer off and create his own thing.

You do a grave disservice to all those whose work is in the scientific mainstream and who are innovative and creative experimenters.

Bernie Mooney (121) said:

Ah, but is the definition of extraordinary quite often subjective?

Not to people working in a field of inquiry, no.

What exactly constitutes an extraordinary claim?

More or less anything that isn’t a straightforward extension of what is already known.

. . . Why the need to demand more proof from one guy as opposed to another?

It’s not a question of demanding more evidence from one researcher than another. It’s a question of demanding more evidence for one claim than another.

Over here in Europe we often come late to these exchanges.

Or too early.

And for the record, I WAS making fun of the word “performativity.” I don’t care how useful it is in an academic journal, it’s a silly word in common, everyday “interlocution.” (Snicker!)

That’s not what I am saying. I am saying they dismiss it outright without even entertaing the thought. And I’m not talking about the crackpot guys with no evidence. I’m talking about the people who have evidence that should at least get people to say, “Hmmm…this looks interesting.”

Such as who, then?

There is a difference between someone saying “oh, look, here’s something interesting, it might mean such-and-such”, and someone saying “here’s something interesting, we investigated further and have shown that it means such-and-such”. The first will likely get dismissed, while the second will get a hearing. See if you can guess why.

I’m not in science, but I like science and read enough to know that science, like pretty much any other field, refuses to entertain new ideas that shake up the status quo.

You have failed to make a convincing case that this is so.

And I think it is a worse thing in science since science is the main field that helps us progress as a society.

Perhaps so.

I still stand by my belief that science stands in its own way.

But you have not explained why you hold this belief. Instead, your comments show a lack of understanding of what is happening in modern science, and your examples of “fringe science” that turned out to be correct are simply unconvincing.

Think about how far science could have advanced; where we would be progress-wise if there wasn’t a vigorous defense of the status quo that dismisses anything that challenges it.

Again, you make this statement on the assumption that your thesis is proven, but it is not. Where is there a “vigorous defnece of the status quo” in modern science? And I mean this in relation to ideas that have genuine merit, rather than outright woo like that which Chopra peddles.

What I have seen in science in the last 20 years is a whole heap of discoveries that confounded expectations (how about Dark Energy? No-one wanted it, no-one likes it, and no-one knows what it might be, but it seems to exist). I also see vigorous efforts to find new theories to replace those that we know to be incomplete (viz, the Standard Model, BBT and quantum gravity). I see efforts to test established theories (Gravity Probe B, for instance) and I see the search for new physics (the LHC).

And since we’re on an astronomy site, what about the travails of Louis A. Frank and Clayne Yeates and their discovery of “ice comets? They actually changed the standards of proof for them. Someone will correct me if I’m wrong but from what I read, the standard of proof is two images. Yeates provided a journal with two. Then they said it wasn’t enough. He needed three. In fact, he had six sets of images.

I remember reading comments on that discovery and man were they vicious. Some called him nuts and a fraud. One guy blasted NASA for their willingness to allow him to place cameras on some spaceshot to take images saying NASA had lost all credibility. Astronomer’s said, “If these things exist, we would have seen them.”

Frank himself said, soon after his discovery created controversy, “For the past two years I paid the price for being wrong. Now I’ll pay an equal price for being right. After all, you can’t just tip the scientific world askew and expect everyone to cheer.”

This is just normal. Every branch of science has debates that rage fiercely about whether such-and-such is correct or not. The scientific literature, and conferences, are arenas for the harshest of criticism. It is through this process of criticism that we arrive at a better understanding of the world.

And it seems that because I have a problem with what I perceive to be a huge problem in mainstream science, I get dismissed as some woo guy or a troll or anti-science because you can’t question the behavior of the scientific community.

No, you were supporting Chopra (or at least seemed to be).

You suggested that no innovation occurs in mainstream science.

You suggested that fringe “science” was the only area where innovation occurs.

This is why you have been jumped on.

However, your examples of “fringe” innovation have mostly been anything but fringe. Your examples simply illustrate how severe is the criticism through which any new idea must pass to be accepted as true (or probably true). No-one is saying this is perfect, and a fairly convincing argument can be made that older scientists tend to cling onto their ideas and reject innovation, and have a disproportionate influence over the scientific world, but this is different from what you were claiming.

So, unless you have done this in a comment I have not yet read (no, I still have not read all the comments), you have not supported your suggestion that mainstream science stifles innovation, nor your suggestion that innovation only happens in fringe “science” areas. You have implicitly supported Chopra because he is outside the mainstream, but you have failed to acknowledge that his ideas and statements about the universe are plain old wrong.

The problem is many people, some of whom I noted in my one comment have provided evidence, but even when that evidence is presented, they are rebuffed. I’ve read plenty of stories of the many scientists, later proven right, who were ridiculed by their colleagues and threatened with loss of funding. There were actual symposiums convened to debunk Wegener’s theory of continental drift.

I was not going to mention Wegener, because his evidence for continental drift wasn’t convincing enough.

To suggest as he did that the continents float about the surface of the Earth was too radical for most geologists of the time to accept. Within the context of the time, it was an extraordinary claim. His evidence, however, was not extraordinary. It was not until the 1950s, when magnetometry readings of the Atlantic seabed showed that the two halves of the Atlantic sea floor mirrored one another, that the idea was taken seriously. Those new data could not be explained without continental drift.

There is cutting edge science out there and it’s being time by what I call the “young turks.”

No, don’t just allude to them and move on. Who are these people?

They are looking beyond current pardigms.

This is glib and easy to say, but what does it mean in this context? What do you consider the “current par[a]digms” to be, and how is it that mainstream science is not looking beyond them?

By their own admissions they are pretty much working outside the mainstream. I have to admit I’m a big fan of outsiders in any field.

Then could it be that this is skewing your view?

What is the benefit to working outside the mainstream, and what potential disadvantages might there be?

Innovation and progress don’t come from the mainstream, they come from the fringes. They come from people who look in new directions.

This assertion comes with the implicit assumtion that no-one in mainstream science is looking in new directions, or is innovating.

What poppycock!

Look up M-theory. Look up supersymmetry. Look up loop quantum gravity. These are all recent ideas being investigated by mainstream scientists in various attempts to unify quantum mechanics with gravity, and / or to extend or replace the Standard Model of particle physics.

I’ve read of mainstream physicists who hope that the LHC finds something completely unexpected, because this would be more interesting to them than mere confirmation of the Standard Model.

If we expand the scope back about 30 or 40 years, there’s so much innovation in mainstream science that it is hard to know where to start. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould spring to mind, as does Stephen Hawking.

“And make sure the examples you share are true cases where someone’s groundbreaking science was ignored because it went against prevailing opinion and not because it lacked convincing evidence to back it up, or the interpretation of that evidence was debatable.”

First, if the evidence rises to the point of being ‘debatable, then I submit that it is worth exploring.

Maybe so, but that does not make it worth announcing.

Space considerations preclude a comprehensive list, so I’ll just list a few. Probably the most famous one is Semelweis.

This example is from quite some time ago. The scientific establishment that existed in 19th-century Europe has long since ceased to be. This hardly supports your thesis that mainstream science is being stifled by a lack of innovation.

More recent we have Carles Townes and lasers. Even after it lasers were considered “a solution in search of a problem.”

This is exactly true, but you seem to think it supports your case. Lasers really were a solution in search of a problem : no-one knew how they could be applied in any practical or investigative sense. Not even Townes. In what way does this imply that innovation was stifled?

The scanning tunneling microscope (the names I forget) which when it was demonstrated the audience still ridiculed it.

I don’t recall STM being ridiculed. Instead, my memory is one of excitement when this was publicised.

Lynn Margulis was turned down for funding by the National Science Foundation because her idea broke all the rules of biology. She went outside and continued her research and 8 years after she was turned down she won the Nobel Prize for her work.

No, her idea did not break “all the rules of biology”, and it was not hers originally. The idea had been around for over 100 years when she started working on it. What Margulis did was collect the evidence to convince everyone that mitochondria and chloroplasts arose through endosymbiosis.

Given that her key work was carried out in the 1960s, I think it is just as likely that she was refused funding because there was either too little money for too many applications (this is always the case in science) or because she was a woman (yes, in the 1960s there was a substantial bias against women in science – they had to be twice as good as the men to get the same level of respect).

Even if her application was refused funding because her idea went against the mainstream, so what? The NSF is only one funding body out of many. I think you’ll find that most of her contemporaries went elsewhere for funding when they had a grant application turned down by the NSF too. I know of scientists in the UK who have a set of preferred funding bodies (such as, for exmaple, the BBSRC, the MRC and the Wellcome Foundation) to which they turn with more or less every application they make. You make it sound as if something unusual was occurring.

More recently, in the 2000s, Barry Marshall’s link between gastric ulcers and bacterial infections. In his Nobel acceptance speech he said, “”Before finishing I want to acknowledge all those scientists who failed to recognize HP…Without them I would have had a very different career.”

Again, he was hardly non-mainstream. It is true that few others accepted his hypothesis, but that was a combination of established medical practice (please note that medical practice and the practice of science are not the same thing) and the fact that his initial evidence was circumstantial. Once his evidence was genuinely convincing, everyone accepted it.

Now, many will point and say,”See, these are examples of science correcting itself. Yeah, but it only corrects itself after being dragged kicking and screaming.

No. Not “kicking and screaming”. Requiring firm evidence to change the established view. In each of your examples, the practitioners did obtain convincing evidence and it turned out that they were right.

Now, consider in the same light Fleischman and Pons and their work on “cold fusion”. By making a grandiose claim that exceeded the support that their evidence could provide, and then by refusing to accept correction when it was proposed, they destroyed their own credibility as scientists. When they first announced their “discovery”, their evidence was very much on a par with that available to (for example) Margulis or Marshall at the beginning of their respective journeys. But what Margulis and Marshall did that Fleischman and Pons didn’t do was to obtain better evidence.

So far you have offered nothing that suggests that innovation is the exclusive province of scientific mavericks.

Here’s a counter-example for you: herpesviruses encode a gene of which the function, in the 1980s, was unknown. They were termed pseudoproteases, because it was assumed that they had a protease-like function (based purely on sequence analysis). However, around 1990, McGeoch showed that these genes (and the proteins they encode) were a type of dUTPase. They had the five characteristic sequence motifs. But, they were too large to be dUTPases (dUTPase, from human to E. coli is active as a homotrimer) and they wouldn’t form trimers. McGeoch was able to show that the herpesvirus dUTPase gene had arisen through a duplication of the protein-coding sequence, forming a double-length dUTPase protein. Instead of having three active sites (one each junction between subunits of the trimer), it had only one. And instead of the dUTPase motifs contributing to different active sites, all 5 contributed to the one active site. However, their positions within the peptide sequence matched the corresponding positions of the human and bacterial proteins.

This is innovation, working within the scientific mainstream. True, it was no paradigm shift, but that expression gets abused so often it has almost lost its meaning. (It could be argued that the paradigm was “dUTPase is active as a homotrimer”, and that this was indeed overturned, but I don’t agree with that).

Aww man you guys kept it going! What fun! I really do appreciate the, um, enlightenment.

Hmmm … your tone makes it clear that you have not understood. Still, since you are clearly so entrenched and closed-minded in your opinion about science, this is not for you. This is for readers of this thread.

You insistence on calling something you don’t deem necessary “voodoo” is hi-larious.

Chopra’s nonsense isn’t merely “unnecessary”. It’s wrong.

And oh boy, it must be a lot if work breaking down these posts in to bullet lists that you can refute.

No, refuting your comments is really easy.

Its a lot of work defending your faith, I’m sure!

Since I don’t have any faith in much of anything really, this is not relevant. What is it that you thought you were referring to?

But the fact is (I’m sorry, can I use the word “fact” here?) is that is this sort of one sided, close minded dogma that really, really makes me sad for our future.

Fine. Cease to apply your closed-minded attitude, then. That should help to cheer you up. Just because science (or scientists) disagrees with you, doesn’t mean science is wrong.

Great, science will take us yo the stars…where we can measure stuff, pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves for how right we are.

No. Where we can learn lots of new stuff.

Call it science, call it skepticism, but your faith (it’s ok, it’s not a dirty word) doesn’t have all the answers either, but reading the comments here, I’m pretty sure this is yet another organized religion that I’m not interested in.

Which just goes to show that your reading comprehension is at fault, not the blog and its comments.

You are the one claiming that we have “faith”, but you do not make an argument to support this claim. You are the one claiming that scientists are “close-minded” (me, I keep my mind close by me all the time – or did you mean to say “closed-minded”? which means something altogether different), but you do not make any kind of case to show that this is so. You liken scepticism to a religion but you have not even attempted to demonstrate the likeness.

In other words, your comments are nothing but hot air and rhetoric.

And yes, I actually believe we figured out we revolved around the sun in 1974. (ok, not really. I meant 1984.)

More fool you, then. Have you never heard of the concept of looking stuff up? Or was this last paragraph an attempt at satire?

Its not that I am unable to offer an introduction to the academic critique of science. I am simply unwilling. This is partially due to not wanting to put forward the considerable effort that it would require and secondly because I feel that a blog-appropriate length introduction would be so superficial that it would be either useless or so incomplete that it would be detrimental to fostering interest. I do not think this is due to my academic background. It is just the nature of the subject.

I know what you mean. Exactly the same could be said, for example, of enzyme kinetics. (But I may one day find I have the urge to try.)

Philosophy of science is a whole area of study that is not taught in most undergraduate science courses. Most scientists are aware of its existence to some extent, but I suspect that the day-to-day processes of doing science generally cause the acquisition of a deeper understanding of it to regularly fall to the bottom of the “to do” list.

Oh. I get it now.

I am not trying to please a popular audience with my word choice which has been honed to succeed in academia.

Erm … did you notice you are commenting on a popular-science blog?

Try getting in the journals and cited without using disciplinary jargon.

Irrelevant.

I enjoy new words and concepts.

As, I am sure, do many of us here. However, I fail to see how this explains your use of densely-academic text in your comments to a popular-science blog post.

I find Discover and its blogs useful to look at the big picture including the state of science and how it is publicly perceived. I do not wish to write for it.

Fair enough, but can you at least see how you are writing for a different audience than is Phil? I strongly suspect that many of the people who might normally read through the comments would give up on even trying to understand yours, not because of the intrinsic difficulty of the concepts, but because of the linguistic style and choice of terms you display.

Since when is eloquence (along with playing with style and rhetoric) a negative trait?

Eloquence is wholly positive, and would make a refreshing change on the t’internet.

Use of impenetrable jargon, however, is not eloquence. I have a pretty high standard of education, and a pretty good knowledge of English, and I had never before encountered the term “performativity” (for example). And the way you use it does not give me sufficient clues to decipher a meaning. Having said that, I do have access to a dictionary and could look it up.

[Takes dictionary off shelf, looks up "performativity"]

OK, in a dictionary with over 220,000 definitions, “performativity” does not rate an entry. So, it’s either a very new term (my dictionary is over 10 years old), or a very obscure one, or a technical term.

I can see that reading between the lines is not your forte. You criticized me for my writing style. I retorted that academic writing has naturalized it for me and then proposed that scientific determinism may be a symptom of scientific praxis.

It seems that the scientists you presume to criticise are not the only folks who need to brush up their communication skills.

Are you hiding behind jargon because you cannot articulate your point in more everyday language or because it makes you feel superior?

You then ridiculed me for using the word perfomativity

No-one has done this.

Kuhnigget (not JJ), questioned the term. It seemed to me that this was intended to elicit an explanation of the term, not to cast ridicule on its user. Still, while I’m at it, why is it that you either cannot or choose not to explain the meaning of “performativity” in your own words?

which I then showed is a real academic term and not something I made up, like a perceived crank may.

I didn’t see anyone questioning whether or not it is a real term, just an attempt to find out what it means.

JJ: So people that you do not agree with are annoying? You are a boor.

From my perspective, it is not the fact that you disgaree, but that you cannot articulate adequate grounds for disagreeing.

You have pontificated on the state of science and the behaviour of scientists, but without any substantive justification for so doing. (Caveat – I haven’t read all of the comments yet, so apologies if you’ve done just this in a post I haven’t got to yet).

This is why most people in both the sciences and the humanities shun direct interaction with the public.

I have never yet met a scientist who does not relish every opportunity to talk about their work. Perhaps what you really mean is that most scientists have trouble articulating their work in terms that the uneducated may easily grasp. That is a completely different issue. Or maybe two issues (one of the communication skills of the scientist, and one of the poor status of science education in our western culture).

Especially in the US. Ever wonder why there is not a US cognate to the College de France? Here is why. When you say something the public does not like the circus starts and you are either wrote of as a crank or publicly ridiculed.

Gosh, and here I was thinking it was because the French hate USAians!

[yes, just kidding, folks!]

Nigel…Show me the non-refuted experiments that support certain advertisements and arrays of item placement that work across the board.

No, sorry, I don’t have the references. I was paraphrasing from an article I read 3 or 4 years ago.

When I first started graduate school I had a university job that looked at this sort of thing. They do not hold up cross-culturally. They are incredibly context specific.

This may be true, but that does not change the fact that supermarkets, advertisers, marketing folks and so on have become adept at manipulating their customers (or their clients’ customers, as appropriate).

I am very wary to call supermarket advertisement placement and many other things in the social sciences (applied or otherwise) “scientific” in the same way that kinetics or glycolysis are. They are vastly different beasts. As Foucault adroitly wrote in “What is an Author”

And yet supermarkets have enough evidence that they can squeeze lower prices from their suppliers if they place that supplier’s products on the “premium” shelves (typically just below eye-level). It is quantifiable and reproducible enough that I would call it science.

Now, I’m not going to claim that it is on a par with kinetics or glycolysis, which have both evidence and theory, but it is certainly as good as (for example) Natural History before evolution came along to explain everything.

“Reexamination of Galileo’s text may well change our understanding of the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand, reexamining Freud’s texts modifies psychoanalysis itself, just as a reexamination of Marx’s would modify Marxism.”

True, but I don’t see how relevant it is here. I’m not talking about wishy-washy theories based as much on supposition as anything else. I’m talking about effects that have been measured and quantified.

This is the main difference between the hard and soft sciences. The trouble is separating them. Untangling them is a horrific Gordian knot.

Agreed.

JJ (the other one) said: “Nigel said…”

Er, hang on, Nigel said nothing of the sort, that annoying Craig fellow did.

I guess I need an editor here of some description. I hope I don’t put down the wrong kind, though, that would be embarrassing.

OK, got it.

Nigel said “JJ: I am sorry that I do not have a proofreader for my blog comments.”

Following your style, this is where you would point out the distinction between general editing, copy editing and actual proofreading. Except doing so by naming a bunch of authorities on these subjects and acting like it’s below you to actually spell out said distinctions.

I don’t think this was me. I have not seen another Nigel in this thread (but have not yet read all comments). What comment number are you referring to here?

@kuhnigget: I agree a good bicker can be fun…in a somewhat frustrating way.