[balrog666]

The ideal scientist should have a passionate dispassion about the conculsions of his theories. It is what it is, nothing added or subtracted.

There's no such thing. Scientists are human too; they just tend to get excited by learning new things. I would say that insatiable curiosity and a keen sense of humor are why they become scientists in the first place.

[longshadow]

insatiable placemarker

[js1138]

The individual scientist is free to be biased, opinionated, speculative, or just plain nuts. The integrity of science does not depend on the integrity of the individual. And everyone is eventually at least partially obsolete.

Nothing new would ever be discovered if scientists didn't speculate. Newton speculated about the behavior of objects in a vacuum, although he had never seen anything approaching a perfect vacuum, nor did he have any way of demonstrating that space was a near vacuum, although he assumed such.

[Wonder Warthog]

"There's no such thing. Scientists are human too; they just tend to get excited by learning new things. I would say that insatiable curiosity and a keen sense of humor are why they become scientists in the first place."

A good scientist must be both--passionate in pursuit of new ideas, but dispassionate in his examination of the data "testing" those ideas. And yes, achieving that seemingly contradictory state is hard, indeed.