Re: FWD (SK) Re: Cosmology Question [fringe theories]

From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sun Feb 23 2003 - 09:02:19 MST

  • Next message: Nathanael Allison: "Nano question?"

    Stirling Westrup, Wed Feb 12, 2003 09:47 pm:

    >Yeah, I guess the 'polarizing incident' is a correct
    >assessment. I have a real problem with the fact that the vast
    >majority of times I've talked to a proponent of theory <X> and
    >said "You know, the recent discovery of <Y> is inconsistent
    >with this theory", the response has been a personal attack.
    >Usually it takes the form of an assumption that I must be in
    >some non-<X> camp, or that I therefore believe any number of
    >insane theories from the lunatic fringe.

    Maybe that person is simply overworked, leaving very little buffer
    to talk normally ...

    >Its been rather rare, but refreshing, when the answer is a shrug and
    >an "Well, we're looking into that. We may need to change the
    >theory."

    I don't think scientists are any different from 'normal' people who
    have a hard time admitting that they are wrong or that they don't know
    something. That's a tough one for many people, and I think that
    psychologists have just as many clients who are scientists as people
    who work in other professions (that would be an interesting
    statistic to see though). Writing a PhD should break some of those
    bad habits, though, because I think that's a very humbling
    experience, right at the beginning.

    >I'm not anti-science, just anti-stupidity, and the point I was
    >attempting to make was that stupidity and rigidity of thought are as
    >prevalent in the sciences as everywhere else, and (as far as I can
    >discern) in roughly the same proportions as in any other field of
    >human endeavour including, for example, business administration.

    >I was initially very surprised at this, since I had always assumed
    >the sciences would be self-selecting for the best and the brightest,
    >and that scientists would be interested foremost in the truth, and
    >would not heavily invest ego into whatever theory they currently
    >favoured.

    I don't know who were all of the scientists you met- there are
    different fields with different proportions of ego-heads. The cosmic
    dust field, for example, has almost none of that ego-head nonsense.
    (My sample is about 50 people)

    I would still say that scientists are a little more interested in
    true answers than other people, but I don't think that they are
    vastly different in psychological profile regarding ego. The only
    area that they might be self-selecting that looks different is their
    willingness (mapping to a daily motivation) to work hard for little
    money.

    >All that being said, you will note that the vast majority of
    >cosmological press releases (including the one someone included in
    >this thread) emphasize not the changes to theories that the new
    >results will require, but how well they always fit with existing
    >theories.

    They might be using 'theory' too vaguely. There's the following
    aspects to consider too. (Some quotes... A friend gave me some nifty
    quotes by astronomers and other scientists yesterday and I'm itching
    to use them)

    "The trouble is that inflation is a paradigm rather than a model,
    and has many different realizations which can lead to a range of
    different predictions." ---Andrew Liddle

    "A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model
    has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant."
    ---Manfred Eigen

    "The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the
    questions." ---Samuel Carlin

    >My own personal theory is that they are afraid that any portrayal of
    >the most exciting part of scientific discovery, the "Uh oh, what
    >kind of result is THIS?", will somehow allow the lunatic fringe to
    >gain a toehold and start announcing that the universe is shaped like
    >a chicken, or some nonsense.

    No that doesn't seem right to me. The scientists I have experience
    with truly love that moment when the see something and say to
    themselves: "Oh.. now _that_ is odd ..." I don't know of scientists
    who are motivated by what the lunatic fringe will think. Even the
    Mars scientists I know, who have more than their average volume of
    fringe people to deal with, are not driven that way.

    Could it be that there was a dropout in proper lingo so that you
    weren't communicating the question(s) clearly, or else they
    were not grasping the meaning of your words? Maybe they thought
    you meant something different.

    If the scientists treat something that is a model as a 'law' then
    they are wrong to approach it that way, but I don't think that the
    fringe element has anything to do with that behavior. More likely
    the scientist is ignorant of the context of the model, in other
    words, what are the ranges of relevance of that model and so
    they might be applying the model too broadly.

    >Anyway, I hope that the above post gives a better understanding of
    >where I was coming from in my last post. To bring things full
    >circle, my original reply to the post that started this thread was
    >just trying to point out that it is generally not possible to
    >determine the "likelyhood", "strength", "staying power" or similar
    >metric of a given theory by either consulting the popular press or
    >surveying random scientists in the field. Either method will end up
    >heavily biased in favor of whatever is the current big theory.

    I would think that surveying random scientists (in the field in
    question) would yield a good approximation of the best theory,
    though.

    >I suppose you could even test this statement, given a sufficient
    >historical database of now-defunct theories and the popular and
    >private communications of the major scientific players in the field.
    >Certainly, the (admittedly small amount) that I have read on the
    >history of scientific innovations seems to support my conjecture.

    It's a history of science question, so perhaps there's a thesis
    completed on this topic ..? (out of my area of expertise ..
    maybe someone in extroland can answer this )

    Amara

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    Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara@amara.com
    Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
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    "I do not know." -- Joseph Louis Lagrange [summarising his life's work]
    


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