Trust Us, We're Scientists
The post immediately below this one and a recent article I read about the pathetic state of what passes for Science these days has inspired me to rant. :)
The article is here and talks about what may be the "single biggest cases of scientific misconduct ever"...not counting AGW.
Back in the mid 1970's the the world renowned theoretical physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement address at Caltech on "Cargo Cult Science" and the importance of scientific integrity. If you don't know who Feynman is, and you have more than a passing interest in science and knowledge you should. He is a personal source of inspiration and someone I've always admired greatly, in addition to being a bonafide genius he had a back for making the complexities of hard and theoretical sciences accessible to the general public. Much like Carl Sagan did when he wrote the original COSMOS. You could argue that Feynman was his generation's Sagan.
His speech can be found here and I STRONGLY recommend checking it out, along with some of his books.
That speech, and its warning, goes directly to the issue we have in Science today as exemplified by the the sort of sloppy scientific work, scandals and coverups we see (e.g. anthropogenic global warming, etc). A sad additional element is the reduction of science in the popular culture to something akin to another form of religious faith. Many people believe in the importance of science and scientific discovery, but poor education in the history of scientific discovery, the required rigor of the scientific method and scientific integrity, means they don't really understand how it works, why its important, and how to tell the good from the bad. It becomes a blind faith that may not be questioned. A fan club that all the "Cool Kids" belong to.
The elimination of questions, aggressive challenge and skeptical inquiry is the death of real science. "The Science" is never "closed". Over thousands of years the scientific understanding of the world has continuously evolved and changed as we learn and understand more. The idea that the universe revolved around the Earth came from the 2nd century Greco-Egyptian scientist and mathematician Ptolemy and represented the accepted scientific understanding (the "scientific consensus" if you will) of the universe for 1500 years. This popular scientific consensus was later adopted by Kings and the Medieval Church and it became a crime and a heresy to be a skeptic (or in modern terms a denier) of the Ptolemaic geocentric model. Eventually the works of denier scientists like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler came to replace the old scientific consensus with the new Heliocentric model. But only after much ridicule, persecution and some death. The sort of political and scientific bullying and persecution of those who challenge the orthodoxy around AGW is very akin in my mind to the sort of things we saw with things like Geocentrism vs Heliocentrism.
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The article is here and talks about what may be the "single biggest cases of scientific misconduct ever"...not counting AGW.
Back in the mid 1970's the the world renowned theoretical physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement address at Caltech on "Cargo Cult Science" and the importance of scientific integrity. If you don't know who Feynman is, and you have more than a passing interest in science and knowledge you should. He is a personal source of inspiration and someone I've always admired greatly, in addition to being a bonafide genius he had a back for making the complexities of hard and theoretical sciences accessible to the general public. Much like Carl Sagan did when he wrote the original COSMOS. You could argue that Feynman was his generation's Sagan.
His speech can be found here and I STRONGLY recommend checking it out, along with some of his books.
That speech, and its warning, goes directly to the issue we have in Science today as exemplified by the the sort of sloppy scientific work, scandals and coverups we see (e.g. anthropogenic global warming, etc). A sad additional element is the reduction of science in the popular culture to something akin to another form of religious faith. Many people believe in the importance of science and scientific discovery, but poor education in the history of scientific discovery, the required rigor of the scientific method and scientific integrity, means they don't really understand how it works, why its important, and how to tell the good from the bad. It becomes a blind faith that may not be questioned. A fan club that all the "Cool Kids" belong to.
The elimination of questions, aggressive challenge and skeptical inquiry is the death of real science. "The Science" is never "closed". Over thousands of years the scientific understanding of the world has continuously evolved and changed as we learn and understand more. The idea that the universe revolved around the Earth came from the 2nd century Greco-Egyptian scientist and mathematician Ptolemy and represented the accepted scientific understanding (the "scientific consensus" if you will) of the universe for 1500 years. This popular scientific consensus was later adopted by Kings and the Medieval Church and it became a crime and a heresy to be a skeptic (or in modern terms a denier) of the Ptolemaic geocentric model. Eventually the works of denier scientists like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler came to replace the old scientific consensus with the new Heliocentric model. But only after much ridicule, persecution and some death. The sort of political and scientific bullying and persecution of those who challenge the orthodoxy around AGW is very akin in my mind to the sort of things we saw with things like Geocentrism vs Heliocentrism.
posted by The Mad Builder of Periwinkle at 13:25
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