scary things at CRTC

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:49:27AM -0400, Robert Brockway wrote:
> During my science education I was taught to be constantly on guard 
> against scientific dogma.
>
> Scientists are human and don't always act purely in accordance with the  
> scientific method.
>
> Many scientists have become defensive when their life's work (and perhaps 
> their reputation and livlihood) has been threated by new discoveries.
>
> Many of them have clung beyond all reason to the work of their youth  
> instead of accepting there were major flaws in their theories.  They make 
> up more and more elaborate theories to account for the apparent  
> discrepances between their earlier work and reality.  They assume their  
> work explains reality even when there is evidence to the contrart.  This  
> is faith.
>
> Science is replete with examples of scientific dogma, where large numbers 
> of scientists have ignored the evidence and clung to older theories that  
> looked more and more tenous as time went on.  In the end this resistance  
> usually only went away when the old guard died off.
>
> Plate Techtonics is a great example.  The evidence that continents moved  
> and changed over time was very strong and came from a variety of sources, 
> and yet the geological establishment resisted the idea of decades.
>
> Ideas like an expanding universe were resisted heavily by astronomers (in 
> the early 20th century) who had built their life's work on the assumption 
> that the universe was largely static over time.  The proponents were even 
> happy to suggest that the universe was violating conservation of  
> mass-energy to keep their theory afloat.
>
> Science has also been tainted all too often by cultural prejudices.  
> Scientists well into the 20th century were presenting serious scientific  
> studies that draw conclusions about sexuality or ethnicity that many of 
> us would find abhorent.
>
> The idea that science is always pure and somehow naturally avoids  
> scientific dogma is itself a form of dogma.

The failure of some scientists does not imply a failure of science.
Clearly some scientists were making discoveries and pointing out the
failures in the existing theories.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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