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Modern scientists are “Imagineers.” Such tripe should be condemned because it encourages the modern attitude that speculation equals science. A culture of unbridled speculation permeates every aspect of today’s scientific world. If you read the most sophisticated scientific papers and analyses, you would see guesswork transformed into fact there in black and white. That is science fiction, not science. Flights of imagination have become popular under “thought experiments,” a contradiction in terms.

Real science is governed by the Scientific Method. Unless a hypothesis can be proven true or false by repeatable and repeated experiments it isn’t science. Results must be verified by independent teams of unbiased researchers, by experiments conducted under varying conditions and in different locations. Anything less doesn’t qualify as science. (Now, to be fair, probably 99 percent of the work of science is the thankless drudgery of collecting raw data out in the field. But those heroes who do the leg work are not drawing conclusions.)

A perfect example is Galileo. Aristotle and other Greek philosophers determined – by pure imagination or thought experiments – that if you drop a large and small cannonball, the larger one will fall faster. But nobody tried it until Galilei Galileo dropped cannonballs off the leaning tower of Pisa. The great Aristotle was wrong. Aristotle was brilliant, but totally wrong. Aristotle was highly educated, but wrong. And the physics Galileo discovered helped transform our understanding of nature. We would not have the orbital mechanics needed to land a man on the moon if Galileo hadn’t tested Aristotle’s conclusions. It doesn’t matter if someone is wise or educated; his opinion is meaningless without putting it to the test.

Another example is cold fusion. In 1989, chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann made headlines by announcing that they had achieved fusion at room temperature – “cold” fusion. That would mean the generation of limitless, clean energy from water under relatively simple conditions. But when other researchers tried to repeat the experiments, no one could reproduce their positive results.

That is real science. Other teams have to be able to reproduce the same results. You can’t get from here all the way to science without repeating the experiment many times. Cold fusion was disproven at the stage of other teams trying to reproduce the results.

But that’s the problem: No one can ever perform even a single experiment to prove man-made global warming or evolution (meaning life springing from non-life) true or false. For certain, no experiment could be repeated.