Note from the Linguistics Moderator
I always gnash my teeth when I see the word "theory" used this way. Unfortunately I can't rant about it since scientists themselves misuse the word.
A theory (in science) is a hypothesis that has been proven true beyond a reasonable doubt. Plate tectonics, evolution, relativity: these are theories because there is no reasonable doubt about them; 99.999% of the doubts are from crackpots, religionists, politicians with an agenda, and precocious teenagers who have taken a few science classes and think they now know everything.
What about that .001%? That's the one professional scientist who has a PhD in this particular science (physics, biology, etc.), has been working in it for 20 years and is regarded as a leader, and who has spent 5 years being bothered by what seems to be a teeny-weeny anomaly in the canonical theory. You won't see this guy on SciForums. He's doing his work the right way and has even already consulted with the scientist who presented the original theory if he's still alive, or if not, with the current leaders in the field. He's not going to shoot his mouth off before his hypothesis has been peer-reviewed and other scientists find it to be promising--because if he's wrong and spoke too soon, no one will ever respect him again.
Don't even present it as a "theory." As I noted above, it is nothing more than a hypothesis at this point. As I also noted, the word is often used incorrectly, even by scientists, who are notoriously poor communicators, especially when talking to us laymen. These are the guys who blithely talk about "String Theory," which is nothing more than some really cool math and a lot of arm-waving.
That's where a lot of wannabee scientists go off the rails: they fail to even try to explain why their hypothesis is better than the canonical theory. It makes so much sense to them that they don't feel the need to prove it to us.
Actually, the beauty of the peer review process is that in order to review another scientist's work, you only have to be almost as good as he is; you don't actually have to be in his class. This means that for any scientist there are hundreds of other scientists who are qualified to review his work. Unless he's Einstein, he can probably find a dozen of them within driving distance.
Although this is true (beyond a reasonable doubt), it's not an effective way to communicate with the people you're trying to reach. What they need to understand is that what they are, in effect, attempting to do, is to peer-review Darwin, or Einstein, or Newton, or whoever developed the canonical theory they're challenging. At this point they should take to heart what I said earlier: You are not qualified to peer-review someone else's work unless you truly are his peer. You must have a PhD in the same science, you must have specialized in the same field, and you must have spent the last ten years going over his work and finding little nits that don't sit well. Otherwise you simply don't understand the canonical theory deeply enough to be able to challenge it.
If you are, you have an advanced degree, you've been working in the field for 20 years, and you've already bounced your ideas off of the modern leaders in the field, so your own errors have been corrected and you understand the issue even better now.
It takes a long time to learn that much science, so for starters he's going to be at least 40 with a PhD.
I think we have a total of about eight members here who have those qualifications. And isn't it interesting that these are the members who never claim to have found the flaw in relativity. Or heliocentricity.
Any dedicated science fiction fan can do that. What they generally cannot do is explain why they believe one of the parameters is wrong. Just because Captain Picard had a transporter and warp drive doesn't mean that these things can be developed in the universe on the other side of the TV screen.
Actually, "mainstream" applies to art, politics and other culture where taste, fashion and popularity are at play. It does not apply to science. If someone utters or writes the phrase "mainstream science," it is safe to ignore anything else he says.
Since SciForums is not an academy, and also since the people who own the website insist on making a profit (non-members are bombarded with advertisements), we can't run this place like an academy. A real academy would not even have a Department of Crackpottery and Pseudoscience.
Again, the people you're talking to are exactly the people who don't realize that you're talking to them. They're positive that they are scientists.
The 12 points are not a matter of opinion. That's part of your problem: you are unable to tell the difference between nonsense and logic, fraud and truth, opinion and fact.
That isn't the issue that was on the table. The issue was that whether something adheres to those 12 points or not is not a matter of opinion: either it does or doesn't. Whether those 12 points are reasonable and should be adhered to is a separate question. Like I said: you have a lot of trouble with logical thought.
That's gibberish, but I think what you are trying to say is that the scientific way of thinking inhibits scientific advancement. That's a common complaint of crackpots, but it is just dead wrong. Scientific thinking - the scientific method - helps you focus on what is likely to yield the best results. It promotes advancement, it does not inhibit it. And that's not opinion, that's historical fact: no other way of figuring out how the natural world works has been anywhere close to as successful as the scientific method/process.
Science isn't a form of government. It can't legislate, although it does record the laws of nature as revealed by something similar to forensics. The only offices it holds even loosely equivalent to an executive branch are research, education and of course all of the applied fields from engineering to medicine and so on. But there is a strong judiciary, operating under a single doctrine: the laws of nature can not be repealed. That makes science more like the supreme court of a country ruled by a tyrant.
In this case, it is not a single body presiding over a few districts but rather a network of courts split into hundreds of jurisdictions by society and field."Jury of peers" in the archaic sense is loosely the same, although "panel of judges" is closer. One of the central fallacies of pseudoscience is that it does not understand the difference between authority and power. The empaneled judges earn their authority to decide questions of natural law through demonstrated achievement. Here's where science exists as a democracy. Any person anywhere in the world, who has reasonable access to a good education, is free to ascend to a position of academic excellence. Behind the iron curtain of pseudoscience, the reverse is true. Any person who has earned that authority is either ridiculed and abused, or else they are redacted, quote mined and twisted in order to paint religion with that thin patina of authority that pseudoscience uses to seize control of vulnerable minds.
It's pretty hard to imagine a scenario in which one theory could falsify another. More than likely some data point is collected which calls a particular theory into question. Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter completely unhinged the Geocentric Theory, yet it took about a lifetime for Newton to discover that gravity was the underlying cause.
Once someone publishes something, whether it amounts to theory or not, that democracy you reject engages. Maybe we should call it a "democracy of opportunity". Anyone is free to argue for or against anything ever published. The only caveat is that it takes equal or better authority to overturn a matter of settled science. This is analagous to the way courts are very slow to overturn dicta--decisions considered settled law--such as whether minorities and women have the same rights as white males. In science we call these first principles. They simply can't be reversed due to the forward arrow of progress. But they remain equally falsifiable nonetheless. Like dicta, as the prevailing theory withstands the test of time, it sinks closer and closer to that bedrock we call "established science".
That's the ticket.
Ironically, evolution shows us how the defense mechanism passed from earlier primates to the religious ones who think that this is the way to protect their brood. See no evil, hear no evil . . .
I don't see the connection there. The fact that a majority had adopted general relativity did not preclude the minority from insisting that the first GPS system allow for the possibility that GR may for some reason not apply. So they flew it with an insurance policy they never needed. I would have hated to have been on the losing team, but other than that I don't see how you connect these. There are some acclaimed scientists who sometimes report their concerns that the minority view isn't given a fair hearing. But stand outside of any courtroom and you'll hear the same thing any day they are in session.
Yes, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.
My posts are entirely voluntary.
As I said:
Aqueous Id said:
