Posted on 10/13/2005 5:15:33 PM PDT by blam
Space scientists are Drama Queens.
Yeah, but space scientists are still Drama Queens.
Hmmm.
It's interesting to see a thread with only two real participants and a lot of hangers on.
Archaeology and anthropology I can understand as being bowlderized by political correctness, but paleontology? I don't know of any attempts to create a "feminist paleontology" or similar such nonsense.
Well, the problem is there could still be another resolution of the problem, based on something else we haven't thought of yet. Dark energy is still ad hoc ; it's not directly observed, but rather hypothesized to make the equations fit. The GR equations reconcile a lot of observations, and so shouldn't be cavalierly discarded; but at the same time, 'dark energy' doesn't have the same level of certainty, as, say, neutrons.
I think the neutrino analogy is valid. Fermi came up with neutrinos because conservation laws were apparently being violated, and nobody wanted to throw out conservation laws simply because of anomalies in one phenomenon. However, IMO, neutrinos were still a rather dodgy ad hoc hypothesis until they (or their effects) were observed directly.
We should have a special category of 'stuff', that exists because we need it to exist to keep a valuable theory from falling apart, but where there's no other independent verification of its existence. And we should be careful not to talk about such 'stuff' in the same way we talk about more substantial stuff.
Having said that, I don't attend cosmology conferences, and I'm sure you're right that the guys in the field are probably appropiately careful about how they talk about such ideas; maybe the advice needs to be given to science journalists and not to cosmologists.
Don't count me as a full participant. I'm basically a layperson as far as cosmology is concerned.
I wonder if the astronomers are taking the inertial reference frame into account when calculating the ages of these stars. Time flows differently depending on your fraction of light speed and your gravitational field, and when I asked an astronomer about this, they don't seem to take it into account very often.
But you two are demonstrating how a civil discussion can take place.
I think Physicist has indicated there are several lines of evidence (but I will allow him to explain what they are).
I would suggest that from a layman's viewpoint, a conceptual placeholder becomes "stuff" when its effects can be clearly delineated by independent avenues of research. Seeing and touching, metaphorically speaking.
Save Hubble!
Presciently. (A typo, not a misspelling.)
Aye, and they lack the flamboyant headdresses of the condensed matter theorists.
Well, someone else points out that science involves a great deal of wrangling. Every thing we publish is worked over by at least two other people, who usually have their own strong opinions, egos, and (often) misconceptions. Major grant proposals, these days, get looked over by an entire panel. A lot of the criticism, while not personal, can be quite negative. If we couldn't find a civil way to do it, the system would fall apart.
Some people can't, of course. The ones who are smart but abrasive survive and just get a reputation as a$$holes. The less smart abrasive ones don't last.
I used to be very abrasive. Watching how a couple of my mentors handled criticism taught me to tone it down. Both would actually suggest referees who they thought would be highly critical but fair, because they wanted to find out what could be wrong with the work before it was set in print.
I agree with most of what you write, except to say there's very little academic Marxism in the hard sciences. Most scientists are determinedly apolitical. And even in the case of Kennewick man, scientists were solidly behind free inquiry. If we slipped up, it was by not getting behind the archaelogical community when NAGPRA was first proposed; that single pernicious piece of legistlation has devastated pre-Columbian archaeology in this country.
What I find significant about Kennewick man is that we were betrayed by both Bush and Clinton. This was a case where Bush could have gone a long way to fight-off his anti-science reputation. He blew it. And don't get me started on McCain, who tried to sneak through an amendment to close the Kennewick 'loophole'.
It was actually Pauli who came up with neutrinos in order to retain the conservation laws, but it was Fermi who named them, and who formally described their behavior when he formulated his theory of nuclear decay.
As usual, the guy who came up witht he name got some of the credit. :-)
I'm not saying that. But people in the field seem to depend more and more on popularized hype to gain funding or enhance their reputations. We're seeing more of the scientist-as-Indiana Jones stuff.
One example who comes immediately to mind is the ever-flamboyant Jack Horner who served as technical adviser on the movie Jurassic Park. He never misses a chance to jump before the TV cameras to promote his notion that dinosaurs are birds. I think he's probably right but I wonder if these issues should be fought out in public instead of in dusty and dull peer-reviewed technical publications.
Two words: "Sandra Harding". ;)
I've heard other scientists describe cosmologists, tongue in cheek, as the "Lords of Creation." It's kinda neat when you have an observation that presents a problem with your theory, and the journalists describe it as the universe having a crisis.
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