In AWT this phenomena can be of real emergent nature and it manifests itself with switching of intersubjectively accepted opinion into dual perspective, whenever the density of facts increases up to certain level. It's analogous to dispersive spreading of waves at the water surface, which is switching its character with distance from longitudinal into transverse waves and back into longitudinal waves again. It corresponds the layered fractally nested character of Universe and observable reality.
For example, from terrestrial perspective the epicycle model of solar system appears relevant. With increasing scope this model has been replaced with heliocentric model but now the evolution of galactic arms can be described with epicycle model again. It's just the number of observable objects, which makes epicycle or heliocentric model more relevant.
After all, the acceptation/refusal of aether model is of the same emergent evolution. Before some time old Greeks believed in Aether, later (Newton) this concept has been replaced with concept of absolute space. In 19th century the aether based models were quite popular again, but they're were replaced later with relativity model of space-time. Now the aether model is returning into physics again with model of Higgs field, which is responsible for particle mass.
The emergent character of observable reality can be understood by example of compression of gas, which is changing into fluid or even solid during this. The density fluctuations of newly formed phase are behaving like another generation of gas particles and when the compression continues, they're condensing and changing into nested fluid phase and solid again. The newly formed phase is embedded into previous generation of matter and this process can be repeated many times.
I presume, the same evolution occurs during pilling and condensation of facts into theories in hyperdimensional causal space. I Czech we have a proverb: "Stokrát nic umořilo osla" which roughly means "A hundred times nothing killed the donkey". The meaning of this proverb is, even the smallest chores are tiresome (if there is too many).
Posts
264 comments:
1 – 200 of 264 Newer› Newest»The Truth Wears Off: Testing the decline effect
Parody of Supersymmetry/Superspace/Theoretical Physics Papers
From this graph is evident, SUSY has been well dead before twenty years already, yet theorists are still investing huge amount of public money into its confirmation. SUSY failure is just one of many recent examples. So far no gravitational waves have been found. Existence of Higgs boson is highly uncertain, too. No extradimensions were found. String theory/LQG are both left unconfirmed for thirty years.. And so on - it's evident, the whole physics of the last thirty years is on the dead track. Its experts are best payed scientists in the human history - and they were all wrong.
The funny part is, most of phenomena predicted with these theories still exists and they're living well - just at another places, when their founders are expecting. We know about many forces, violating inverse square law - yet theorists are struggling with finding of extradimensions. Gravitational waves are known for years - as a cosmic background noise. Higgs fields manifests with Yukawa coupling, which is known for decades. The well known dilepton channel of top quarks decay is just the example of Higgs field symmetry, which the physicists are looking for during Higgs boson searches.
Can We Trust Scientists?
I can't do this anymore, it's too much! Here, go to this link, i'm not doing this anymore, and Zephir, I'm blaming this alll on you, and, now I don't care about grammar correcting because it's TOO MUCH! to ask of a 12 year old to do this. :(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(. And stop ARGUING with each other and just meet each other and work with each other and actuallyRESEARCH with each other instead of yapping off and maybe, just maybe you could be able to find out if this teory is true, instead of WASTING YOUR TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. too much. :(. And become SCIENTISTS. Please for yours and mines sake, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR BICKERING, AND YOUR OWN CURIOUSITY, STOP THAT GOD DANGM BICKERING.
/*..PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR BICKERING .. STOP THAT GOD DANGM BICKERING...*/
Umm, well - isn't it a sorta circular reasoning?
Inability to detect sarcasm, lies may be early sign of dementia. If it's true, then the inability to detect serious meaning (of AWT, for example) could serve as a late sign of infantility, instead. It's not surprising, the finding of TOE is not the job for both quite young, both quite old persons.
Oscar Wilde: "The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything"
Search for dark matter moves one step closer to detecting elusive particle
Actually this result was negative, so it cannot bring us closer, but farther. But mainstream propaganda wants the public support for science, so it inverts the meaning for every episode, which could be confronted with belief of public in mistakable power of science.
Another example of such bias (event the usage of word connection "God particle" can be considered propagandistic)
'God particle' may be discovered soon
What Dr Myers actually said was:
"The performance of the detectors and of the machine means that even at a lower energy we could discover the Higgs or disprove its existence"
Why so many people choose not to believe what scientists say, The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science, Is Science Just a Matter of Faith?
Evidence on peer review—scientific quality control or smokescreen?
Coburn report: NSF wastes millions of dollars on wasteful projects. Response.
It's depressing to see that 1) whether something is publishable in high impact journals is such an important criterion for what we do, 2) skeptical science that replicates and refutes is considered a waste of effort, and 3) students are discouraged from carrying out such work, because there is some strange bias that will hurt their chances of employment.
Why We Have So Much 'Duh' Science: "Eryn Brown writes in the LA Times that accounts of "duh" research abound as studies show that driving ability worsens in people with early Alzheimer's disease, that women who get epidurals experience less pain during childbirth than women who don't, that young men who are obese have lower odds of getting married than thinner peers, and that making exercise more fun might improve fitness among teens. But there's more to duh research than meets the eye writes Brown as experts say they have to prove the obvious again and again to influence perceptions and policy. "Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you," says Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. "There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough." Kyle Stanford, a professor of the philosophy of science at UC Irvine, thinks the professionalization of science has led researchers — who must win grants to pay their bills — to ask timid questions and research that hews to established theories is more likely to be funded, even if it contributes little to knowledge. Perhaps most important, sometimesa study that seems poised to affirm the conventional wisdom produces a surprise. "Many have taken the value of popular programs like DARE — in which police warn kids about the dangers of drug use — as an article of faith," writes Brown. "But Dennis Rosenbaum of the University of Illinois at Chicago and other researchers have shown that the program has been ineffective and may even increase drug use in some cases.
It's trash, so I hope that you don't praise it.
Hello, El Cid, I'm glad to hear you! Your link is perfect, I'll read about it definitely. The connection of aether model to the general relativity follows clearly from this homomorphism.
Is modern physics rotting?
Crazy Research The U.S. Government Is Funding
An essay by Freeman Dyson on the missed opportunities in science: "The progress of both mathematics and physics has in the past been seriously retarded by our unwillingness to listen to one another."
This unwillingness is a consequence of many psychosocial factors of modern era: the increasing number of information and web twaddlers, the increasing level of competition between research groups and the fact, the physicists are motivated in continuity of research and their safe salaries, rather than in actual finding - as Bob Wilson recognized and named pregnantly. And I definitely missed many other potential reasons...
"The wise man speaks because he has something to say, the fool because he has to say something"
Scientists about scientists: a sociological research paper on the mindsets of cosmologists
Studies of studies show that we get things wrong. Of 51 reports, 16 found that a practice currently believed to be effective was, in fact, ineffective.
It’s Science, but Not Necessarily Right - Why Science Struggles to Correct Its Mistakes
Gustave Le Bon, 1895: "The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” "
Lubos Motl wrote:
“The 1500-page manifesto“ (by Anders Behring Breivik) “says many things and if I were given this text before the murder and had the freedom to say what I thought about it, of course that I would agree with a significant part of it. Well, as you can see, I just indirectly said that I agree with many things in it. There are also many things I disagree with.“
Zephir,
Do you think Lubos Motl is a psychopath?
“ And they may even be more efficient while killing - and the probable reason is that Breivik (or his potential counterparts) may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.“
By Lubos Motl :-D
Do you think Lubos Motl is a psychopath?
He's extreme nerd, who can recognize only black & white (as many formally thinking people do). So his thinking is always biased by its very nature. IMO he suffers with Asperger's syndrome. Even the graphic design of blogs and websites speaks for it...;-)
We all think that science is about objectivity and “just the facts, ma’am.” Not so fast, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science have been arguing now for a number of decades.
The Wall Street Journal reports that retractions of scientific papers have surged in recent years, with the top 3 journals issuing retractions being PNAS, Science and Nature. The graph above shows the increase in the rate of retracted papers
img w=640&h=485
Nice post, keep up the good work.
People are biased against creative ideas, studies find
Misconduct in science - An array of errors: Investigations into a case of alleged scientific misconduct have revealed numerous holes in the oversight of science and scientific publishing
Pressure for positive results puts science under threat
Albert Einstein: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality".
Has the Einstein Revolution Gone Too Far?
The Weak Evidence Effect: People who receive weak but supportive evidence are less optimistic about the outcome than people who receive no evidence.
Confirmed at the case of aether theory, antigravity, cold fusion, etc. (weak evidence) with compare to Higgs, gravity waves, superstrings (no evidence). Most of redditrolls (including highly qualified PhD students) tend to believe complex but solely unsupported theories rather than unverified experiments and apparent, but qualitative analogies.
One of the consequences of this seeming paradox is, the unsupported theories are examined until people are exhausted and all money sources are depleted and, while no one bothers to repeat the simple cold fusion experiments, once they were impeached first.
"You are the only person with whom I am actually willing to come to terms. Almost all the other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts; they cannot extricate themselves from a once accepted conceptual net, but only flop about in it in a grotesque way."
-Albert Einstein, (in a letter to Erwin Schrödinger )
Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)
Weathering Fights – Science – What’s It Up To?
Scientists spend two-thirds of their time re-inventing Willis. If we combine it with the fact, scientists are spending 40% of research time with collection of money for additional research, we could fire 87% of them immediately.
The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment,
the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research. Aether theory and cold fusion can be added to the list w/out problem.
Peter Woit
:-D
Albert Einstein: "The greatest obstacle to understanding reality is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge." (Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit, 1901). Then he rejected the quantum mechanics.
"Every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever."
- Karl Raimund Popper -
Graham offers the following Disagreement Heirarchy:
DH0. Name-Calling.
DH1. Ad Hominem.
DH2. Responding to Tone.
DH3. Contradiction.
DH4. Counterargument.
DH5. Refutation.
DH6. Refuting the Central Point.
DH7. Make the Argument Better, and then Refute Its Central Point.
The Biggest Problem in Physics Theoretical physics as ivory tower is described there. Journals won't even bother to read papers that challenge generally accepted assumptions.
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Graham offers the following Disagreement Heirarchy:
DH0. Name-Calling.
DH1. Ad Hominem.
DH2. Responding to Tone.
DH3. Contradiction.
DH4. Counterargument.
DH5. Refutation.
DH6. Refuting the Central Point.
DH7. Make the Argument Better, and then Refute Its Central Point.
U.S. State Science Standards Are "Mediocre to Awful"
Researchers feel pressure to cite superfluous papers
As that work reports, nobody really cared about peer review prior to WWII. We have peer review now because the academic world went from teaching to publish or perish. And as that same work reports, we now have pygmies standing in judgment of giants www.iscid.org/papers/Tipler_PeerReview_070103.pdf, http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-myths-about-scientific-peer-review, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6959/full/425645a.html Juan Miguel Campanario has compiled a list of more than 20 Nobel laureates' rejections by many journals http://www2.uah.es/jmc
How much damage could be caused by a peer reviewer having a bad day?
Challenging dominant physics paradigms
Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong (TED lecture)
"Overall risk of extinction prior to 2100 is 19%"
Now you can generate a "random academic paper.
New research hypothesizes that up to 90% of peer reviewed studies in medical journals is misleading or flat out wrong. Can scientists be trusted, the article wonders?
Review of Roger Schlafly’s "How Einstein Ruined Physics"
The British astrophysicist Arthur S. Eddington once wrote, "No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory."
Albert Einstein: "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."
Too many sloppy mistakes are creeping into scientific papers. Lab heads must look more rigorously
at the data — and at themselves. Nature Journal itself leads the record in the sloppy rejections of important findings, often leading into Nobel prices later.
More and more that careers in physics are hard to come by, grant very little freedom, and can be quite stressful. This article is particularly concerning: link. It's because the contemporary science, physics in particular is extremely infective, if not useless for human civilization. The physicists are ignoring cold fusion, being partially responsible for energetic and environmental crisis, whereas they're spending billions in useless hot fusion and accelerator research. They're effectively a parasites of human society by now, which is the consequence of their relative prestige during Cold war era: it were indeed just the physicists, who constructed rockets and nuclear bombs. But these times are ower. So far we have no usage for any particle revealed at collider, not to say about theories developed during last forty years, which cannot be even falsified Michio Kaku: How Physics Got Fat (And Why We Need to Sing For Our Supper)
The editors of Infection and Immunity are sending a warning signal about modern science. Two editorials (1 and 2) published in the journal have given other biomedical researchers pause to ask if modern science is dysfunctional. Readers familiar with the state of academia may not be surprised but the claims have been presented today to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that level the following allegations: "Incentives have evolved over the decades to encourage some behaviors that are detrimental to good science" and "The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high profile journal, this is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior to salvage their career." The data to back up such slanderous claims? "In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%." At least a few of such retractions have been covered here.
New Ways to Measure Science
[url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/06/01/1937220/why-we-have-so-much-duh-science]Why We Have So Much "Duh" Science[/url]. Symmetrically, the research of really fundamental, but controversial phenomena, like the "chi" energy and other psychic phenomena is avoided obstinately (the same tendency is observed in mainstream physics, which avoids cold fusion research, etc..). The reason is simple: the community of social scientists is overgrown, so it tends to superficial journalisms and it avoids every risk of carrier. The contemporary scientists are product of long-term evolution in this extent.
Father of String Theory and noted physics scientist Holger Bech Neilsen of Denmark has said that contributions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are over-rated and that there is no need for spending so much on the experiment. Is the LHC throwing away too much data? I wouldn't further comment it, because my stance regarding the LHC research is quite known over the web (you know, all these foggy landscapes and water surface stuffs).
HOW scientific are the social sciences? The mainstream physics is indeed as rigorous as possible - but does it really matter, when it comes to the underlying logics of mainstream theories?
If QFT is ENRON, who are physicists?
Is Physics Among the Dysfunctional Sciences?
Daniele Fanelli: Negative results are disappearing from most disciplines and countries
Positive bias could erode public trust in science
Society: How is it possible so many scientist be wrong Roland Benabou of Princeton have made many papers using a model of "self delusion" that can became "collective"... he studied many variation and application of his theory to explain illogical facts..
Psychologists over the past 50 years have demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones. You can call it self-deception, but it also goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done describing the shape or the size of that catalogue. All this rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs they should really reconsider. Psychologists over the past 50 years have demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones. You can call it self-deception, but it also goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done describing the shape or the size of that catalogue. All this rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs.
Science has a PR Problem
Find it or not, science wins. That's the great thing about science..
Everything wins at the very end by trial and error approach. Construction of cars converges to the optimal value, when all possible designs were tested and found unsuccessful. Is it what the scientific approach means? Even Holy Church accepted the heliocentric model of solar system at the very end. Should we call it a victory of Holy Church? Should we call the victory of Science, if it will admit the Steady state Universe, cold fusion or dense aether model at the very end (while failing in all attempts to deny/ignore it during it)? What actually wins here is the truth only - not the community of scientists, which can be as biased, as the community of religious laymans. What we are paying the physicists for is more insightful approach, than just failure in denial of all opposite ideas.
The Physicists' Bill of Rights
Guerilla enlightenment: Defending science online
The New Yorker: That the Smarter People Are, the More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive Bias (PDF
Quantum gravitist Carlo Rovelli: Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking.
Unfortunately, the more reliable theory is, the more fuzzy it becomes in its predictions. Such a theory is right at 99% situation, but only to 55%. Whereas the very exact theories are of narrow validity scope.
Steven Weinberg: The Crisis of Big Science
Overproduction of Ph.D.s, caused by universities’ recruitment of graduate students and postdocs to staff labs, without regard to the career opportunities that await them, has glutted the market with scientists hoping for academic research careers.
Province cartoonist Dan Murphy wrote a column questioning the value of hunting for the Higgs boson, when humankind has so many other pressing problems to solve. Response of Tim Meyer, a physicist at TRIUMF.
Pointless research is maybe good, but non-pointless research is always better. I'm not worrying the money spend into extreme research in physics (particle collisions) or biology (GMO viruses), my problem rather is with dangerous aspects of this research. We should do it outside in cosmic space at the safe distance from Earth. If we cannot do it safely from financial reasons, then it's an indicia, this research is pointless as well, because we have no money for its utilization, not to say about handling of its accidental consequences.
But what I cannot tolerate at all is the ignorance if not hostile approach of physicists toward really useful findings like the cold fusion. It just illustrates the well known fact, if you give some group of people too much power and money, this group will separate from the interests of people and it will become hostile toward the rest of society, which is feeding it. The contemporary physics is overgrown remnant of Cold war era, when physicists got controversial credit, money and respect for construction of nuclear weapons. But these times are over and now we're facing a huge community of people, who would have no other occupation and they're become a parasites of human society. The fact, these parasites are quite agile makes the things even worse.
Deniers, skeptics, and mavericks
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
"Science today is a new type of religion," Miles said. "New discoveries or concepts that don’t agree with the scientific scriptures are to be banished without a fair hearing."
Positive results from published hypothesis testing is up 22%! Are researchers becoming clairvoyant, less pioneering or is it an indication of increased publication bias?
Science writers: Jonah Lehrer’s scientific errors worse than fabricated quotes
Nikola Tesla: "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."
False positives: fraud and misconduct are threatening scientific research Scientific research is threatened with false negatives too: for example the twenty years standing ignorance if not open boycott of cold fusion research has lead into fossil fuel, oil wars and subsequent financial crisis. As the result, the physicists itself and their research is threatend with their ignorance.
More than half of biomedical findings cannot be reproduced.
A 20-year campaign of scientific fraud says as much about the research community as it does about the perpetrator. The system that allowed such deception to continue must be reformed.
The Crisis in Physics is due to following factors: 1) Mainstream science suppresses all competing theories. 2) The university teaching is wrong; 3) Absence of criticism. 4) Perhaps the crisis in physics is caused by "evolution in reverse" of human race.
Q: So what's up with science? A: It's complicated.
Nepotism and sexism in peer-review (PDF)
A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform (editorial)
Journalistic deficit disorder: What newspapers don’t say matters as much as what they do...
There's a write-up, which proposes seven reasons, why scientists are basically cheating. Some of them are: the successful grant applications are increasingly being treated by universities as outputs - academic journals prioritize the publication of novel results, and they're resistant to the publication of null results or replication studies. Time constrains on getting papers out may result in questionable "data-fishing" techniques, too. Of course, these long term factors don't explain, why the retraction peaks in recent years so rapidly..
The Biggest Problem in Physics Is Institutional: in fact the system is designed to summarily reject ideas that question existing physics
Scientific papers that get rejected on first submission go on to get more citations when eventually published
Kerry Cue, Canberra Times, 5 October 2011: ”Science today is about getting some results, framing
those results in an attention-grabbing media release and basking in the glory.”
A 'ripple effect' means retractions stigmatize entire scientific fields. After a retraction, the rate at which related papers were cited dropped by 5.7% relative to a selection of control papers that were not related to a retraction.
A lost generation? M. Shifman provides an "impressionistic portrait" of the current state of particle theory. I wouldn't call the contemporary physicists a "lost generation" - rather the generation which completely misunderstood the practical meaning of its own insights.
Trends in Pharmacological Sciences: Something rotten at the core of science?
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
The Myth of Self-Correcting Science - Sarah Estes - The Atlantic
GUO research group of University of Michigan is composed of Asians completely
Why kids have an inflated sense of their science skills. "A massive analysis of some 350,000 students in 53 countries has uncovered a paradox: Students in many countries that are mediocre at science have an inflated sense of good they are." IMO it's evolutionary trait. The young people are optimized into learnings of many facts in shortest time - so that their thinking is very selective and schematic - in the same way, like the contemporary education system of science, which presents only very schematic facts as a picture of the whole branch of science. It's not accidental in this point, that the dense aether theory based on nonformal thinking is unpalatable for many redditors here, who are mostly youngsters. Every new more general theory deals just with exceptions from established theories preferably - and these young kids don't know about any - the teachers at schools didn't told it to them. For these kids such a theory has therefore no tangible motivation.
With compare to it, the older people already know, that every rule has its own exceptions, so that they're more trustful and willing to accept the informations outside of the established schemes, often non-critically. It's not accidental, the cold fusion conferences are attended mostly with elderly scientists.
The absolute limits of scientific arrogance
Retraction Watch: Paper by author whose attorneys sent cease-and-desist letter to Science Fraud retracted
Yep, exactly. If the scientists don't value the logic, only the math equations (which were itself derived with using of this logics too, btw) - how one could convince them into using of logic with logical arguments? For example, the equations describing the motion of planets in heliocentric and geocentric models are very different, yet they provide the same results. How to convince the people, that one kind of equations is better than the another, when they don't consider anything, which cannot be computed in many orders of precision?
Poll Reveals Quantum Physicists' Disagreement About the Nature of Reality
John P. A. Ioannidis "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science, Research grants: Conform and be funded.
MIT leaders vindictively persecuted whistle-blower Aaron Swartz until he committed suicide. Disgusting, disgraceful betrayal of academic virtues in craven service to
authoritarian power.
Percy Bridgman: The Logic of Modern Physics (1927)
Tyson is a sorta priest of modern version of religion
Male scientists more likely than females to commit scientific fraud
Is it even possible too have too many science PhDs? Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time Is Graduate School a Ponzi Scheme?
Scientific American censors discussion of cold fusion, including statements by its own editors
Scientific American censors discussion of cold fusion, including statements by its own editors
Data released suggest that, given the choice, even researchers who publish in open-access journals want to place restrictions on how their papers can be re-used — for example, sold by others for commercial profit.
Are We Doing Science the Right Way? Is the push to publish ruining scientific discovery? Is science really self-correcting? Does peer review work? Are labs the right size? Does the quest for grants create a climate that encourages misconduct?
Has the communication of scientific research reached a crisis point? (PDF)
The A@#hole Scientist: Can a vexing sense of entitlement actually aid in the pursuit of knowledge?
The Folly of Scientism: Though physicists might once have been dismissive of metaphysics as mere speculation, they would also have characterized such questions as inherently speculative and so beyond their own realm of expertise. The claims of Hawking and Mlodinow, and many other writers, thus represent a striking departure from the traditional view.
The journal Nature explains why science is, like religion, based on faith. Are American scientists getting more religious? In basic science the percentage of ‘authoritative’ references decreases as bibliographies become shorter. The dictionary is wrong – science can be a religion too.
Transforming physics education By using the tools of physics in their teaching, instructors can move students
from mindless memorization to understanding and appreciation..
Are Physics Conferences A Waste ? An Ethical Issue
Most influential journals (Nature, Science) doesn't accept experimental articles without theories at all - they've policy for it (DOC, PDF)
Hindsight Devalues Science
Pluralistic ignorance
Groupthink and colective delusion as explained in Roland Beanabou model of "mutual assured delusion" :
Illusion of invulnerability – Creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks.
Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions.
Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.
Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.
Which principles are good and which are bad? We can limit ourself to four main different types of principles: 1) dogmatic, 2) empirical, 3) simplifying (or conventional), and 4) epistemological
Rupert Sheldrake: The Science Desilusion (TEDx lecture)
What Do Scientific Studies Show?
Number Of Published Cancer Studies That Can't Be Reproduced Is Shockingly High
Only 0.004% of medical research (animal experimentation) is useful. (comment, polemics)
Pathological Science' is not Scientific Misconduct (nor is it pathological) by Henry H. Bauer (original)
The Pseudoscientists of the APS by Eugene Mallove and Jed Rothwell
Ridiculed discoveries, vindicated mavericks I constantly hear that the number of breakthroughs from crackpots is relatively tiny, or that "vindicated mavericks" are the exception. But we need to be careful with this. After all, the number of uneducated crazy people is enormous, but this has little impact on the statistics regarding new ideas in professional science. It's not honest to ask how many crazy ideas are actually crazy. Instead ask how many CRAZY FUNDING PROPOSALS from SUCCESSFUL SCIENTISTS have turned out to be genuinely crazy. I'm guessing that the number is quite low. Perhaps the number of vindicated crazy research projects is so high, that it's larger than the number of genuinely crazy research projects.
So, if you're going to dismiss or scoff at some crazy idea without bothering to first take an unbiased look ...at least make sure the idea is from a common crackpot. Make damn certain that "the crazy" isn't coming from a professional scientist who is trying to fund a research project to test that idea.
"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable." -J. W. Goethe "When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift
viXra: Crackpots who were Right
Negative comments and wrong predictions (Foresight inst)
Edge: wrong scientific theories
recent: list of vindicated crazy scientists
The Plight of the Obscure Innovator in Science
The Blind Eye of Science
Cognitive Processes & Suppression of Ideas
Closed-minded Science (main page, many other articles)
Neglected Pioneers: Herapath, Waterson
Retraction Watch
Physics: forgotten history
"Impossible", another list of vindicated discoveries
Achievements of eccentric loners
An interesting question: From global warming to fluoride: Why do people deny science? If you read the links in this comment section, maybe you get some answer to this question.
The Twilight of the Scientific Age
The dense aether model provides the geometrical explanation for the contemporary wave of distrust in mainstream science. Our Universe appears like the water surface after splash being observed with its own ripples. While at the proximity the water surface appears chaotic and unpredictable, the ripples spreading along it will get gradually their deterministic character of regular circles, so that the more deterministic approach we will use for the reality description, the better predictions we get. This is the reason, why formal approach of science of the last century has celebrated so big and well deserved success.
In AWT the scope of deterministic zone in the Universe is determined with distance/energy density scale of symmetrical objects - the spherical atom nuclei and dense stars composed mostly of atom nuclei. Just for these objects (and/or the fields around them) the contemporary math of science works best.
But when the spreading of surface ripples continues, the scattering effect will prevail again and the regular ripple circles will fragment into many chaotic waves. The contemporary achievement of technology has enabled us to see farther, than the strictly deterministic approach allows - and many proclamative truths of recent decades are getting questioned again. As we know, the very small and large objects in our universe aren't deterministic and pretty spherical anymore, and the low-dimensional deterministic model fail in their description in similar way, like in the description at common life phenomena at the human scale.
A study suggests that money will continue to be wasted on research into social and psychological interventions unless the methods used by the researchers are fully reported in academic journals
Is Nature unnatural? Decades of confounding experiments have physicists considering a startling possibility: the universe might not make sense
Science is not a path towards truth
Why do physicists gravitate towards jobs in finance? Things rapidly spiral out of control whenever we try to study systems with a large number of components because it is then impossible to keep track of everything.
It's effect of existing financial crisis, which was induced with Iraq war, which was motivated with energetic crisis (it's typical oil war), which was caused with many years standing ignorance of cold fusion findings just with physicists. So that the physicists are paying for their ignorance right now. And quite frankly, they really deserve it, because the physicists transformed into conservative community, which hinders the further progress in the areas, which would require to reformulate the existing theories and which would compete the existing research of various methods of energy production/conversion/transport and storage.
But in AWT this trend is of deeper origin, based on geometry of observable reality, i.e. it's not just a momentary trend. It doesn't explain, why physicists are leaving the physics and seeking job in financial sphere, which suffered with the same crisis. In AWT the observable reality observed with light waves appears like the water surface observed with its own ripples. At the proximity these ripples are pretty circular and easily described with math. I.e. the more math we're using, the more predictions we will get.
But with increasing distance from human observer scale these ripples undergo scattering and their spreading is not regular anymore. From this moment the application of math becomes the more misleading, the more math you'll use. The SUSY, string and LQG theories all face the deep failures. And whole the years, which the young physicists spend with learning of math are suddenly rendered useless and wasted. So that the physicists are seeking another occupation, where they could find at least partial usage for their qualification.
The Case against Public Science The society should bribe the scientists so that their discoveries are more likely to be used to benefit the society and not against it. If we realize, that the actual findings and practical application come just from private research - if not garage scientists - (cold fusion) and the results of basic research rather conserve one hundred years misunderstandings, then I'm rather inclined to defund public science as a whole.
Do scientists trace hot topics?
A couple of weeks before the deadline for new grant proposals in political science were due,the NSF has canceled the program, at least for this grant cycle. Back in March, Congress passed the Coburn Amendment to the Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, which limits political science funding to research that “promotes national security or the economic interests of the United States.” That’s almost impossible standard to demonstrate, so the NSF just canceled all of the funding, rather than invite endless Congressional hearings about this or that grant proposal.
Phlogiston and other discarded science: Hasok Chang (Cambridge) makes the case for scientific pluralism (the development of multiple theories for one phenomena) and the value of the history of science. [74:25]
Most current published research findings in scientific fields are false and may often be accurate measures of bias. More can be done to account for bias, increasing randomized trials and testing true, rather than non-true relationships before running experiments. Paper published in PLOS Medicine.
Let’s Stop Using the Word “Scientism” The working definition of “scientism” is “the belief that science is the right approach to use in situations where science actually isn’t the right approach at all.”
Thomas Szasz is a psychiatrist and author well known for his criticism of the modern psychiatry movement. He once wrote in 1974: "Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors." Not surprisingly, just the medical research suffers with highest incidence (nearly 90%) of retractions and publishing of misleading results. We could say, the roots of all nonscientific traits of contemporary scientific society is a corruption in some form. The physics is not immune against it too, it's just less obvious due the longer cycle of promotion and verification of facts and more emergent (but the more persistent) forms of corruption of researchers.
Schmidt was a physics PhD and reporter for Physics Today for 19 years (one of their best). He wrote a scathing critique of the way in which the physics PhD program trains physicists. The American Institute of Physics fired him for the book, and he sued. After many hundreds of researchers (plus one Noam Chomsky) signed their names in his defense, a very large settlement was reached in his favor.
Physics, a culture of criminality
Dude, Where’s My Data? Self-preservation chokes open science, kills the patient. Why aren't scientists openly sharing data? Because the current model rewards information hoarding.
Study: medical mistakes cause 400,000 premature deaths per year.
Editor: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”
Science isn't about being skeptical towards any theory, but to question every theory. The difference is one is dogmatic while the other demands data and inferences.
Scott Aaronson: Have you looked recently at beyond-Standard-Model theoretical physics? It's a teetering tower of conjectures (which is not to say, of course, that that's inherently bad, or that I can do better). However, one obvious difference is that the physicists don't call them conjectures, as mathematicians or computer scientists would. Instead they call them amazing discoveries, striking dualities, remarkable coincidences, tantalizing hints … once again, lots of good PR lessons for us! As for beauty and simplicity, I dare say that those are the common currency of all mathematical fields. We all look for those, and are all thrilled when we occasionally find them.
Peer Review failure:
Science and Nature journals reject papers because they “have to be wrong. The peer review system is failing us — Science and Nature missed a whopper of a study. If you do revolutionary work, send it somewhere else.
Contrary to previous claims, only 14% +/- 1% of all published research findings are false.
Sixty-one percent of open-access science journals accept hilariously flawed ‘paper’ for publication.
The distrust in science has many reasons - one of them is increasing tabloism of sci-news media in an effort to attract readers.
Gaining ground in the ongoing struggle to coax researchers to share negative results.
The scientists managed to ignore the cold fusion eighty years and now they're surprised, that the society has no money for their toys and grants. This is indeed a hypocritical stance. The medical research is not any better in this regard, as it's mostly driven with Big Pharma lobby. If we consider, more than 90% of medical research fails, then there is a relevant question, if it has a meaning to allow such a research survive. The science itself isn't self-saving, if the society has no money for application of its results. It particularly applies just for results of medical research, which become increasingly inaccessible even for middle class (1, 2). The ineffectiveness and over-occupation in research is one of culprits here. According to a July study in the Journal of the American Medicine Association, U.S. health-care system is broken. More than 48 million people lack health insurance, and despite having the world's highest levels of health-care spending per capita, the U.S. has some of the worst health outcomes among developed nations, lagging behind in key metrics like life expectancy, premature death rates, and death by treatable diseases. The reason is not too little spending in science, but way too much high expenses into research into account of practical implementation of its results. The players of strategical games like the Civilization or Warcraft already know quite well, it has no meaning to spend all resources into scientific research and healing clinics, if they have no one to heal.
40 years of federal nutrition research fatally flawed. It is time to stop spending tens of
millions of health research dollars collecting invalid data and find more accurate measures.
The complex role of citations as measure of scientific quality. The problem with mainstream science, at this moment, is that there is a widespread perception (confusion for some) that there is only one worldview in science worth talking about -- the one which aligns with consensus. Scientometrics reinforces this false premise in science.
Theorists, experimentalists and the bias in popular physics
"Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not"
The hidden message of this finding is, that the scientists are incompetent to judge their own activity.
Revision of Helsinki Ethical Principles: The proportion of clinical trials that report negative outcomes continues to decline, and there’s little doubt that this stems from selective reporting, not improvement in the design and evaluation of interventions. Need to make science more honest again.
New wave of online peer review and discussion tools frightens some scientists
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing - The dire state of nutrition research
Is science just another religion?
List of rejected Nobel prize publications.
100 Authors Against Einstein - Scientific 'Consensus' and Skepticism Consensus is utterly irrelevant to science. The philosophy of science is devoid of consensus. What concerns science is not weight of numbers on the side of an argument, but what the facts are. What the evidence is.
The Fundamental Physics prize continues to be bad for physics.Perhaps the world of physics needs another Ernest Rutherford. When asked what he thought of theorists he famously retorted, “You theorists play games with your symbols, but we are the ones who discover the secrets of the universe”. I dunno if it needs him, but what I know for sure is, when facing such an option, it dismisses it obstinately.
20 Tips for Analyzing Claims of a Scientific Study Some criterions are relevant, some others are misleading and they may even lead into formulation of new Crackpot indexes and Malleus Maleficarum books - i.e. the formal fringe tools, which allow to judge the scientific work without bothering about its actual content. For example the requirement of replications can be quite negatively misleading, as the findings which are threatening the position of many scientists at the same moment are often ignored in quiet and refused to replicate (the cold fusion findings as a typical example).
"Even in the highly rationalised science community, people are susceptible to a social-psychological phenomenon like pluralistic ignorance, where every researcher and policymaker individually may doubt the promises made by a particular research programme but also wrongly believe that everybody else is convinced of its robustness; so they all end up collectively supporting a dubious programme which subsequently receives generous funding," professor Hendricks says and concludes:
"When researchers choose to ignore their private information and instead mimick the actions of researchers before them, they initialise a so-called lemming effect in which everybody publishes in the same journals and applies for funding for the same type of projects. Such a scientific bubble will eventually bust when the programmes' scientific explanations are put to the test, but the problem is that they may already have drained the research system from resources. And then the system will be faced with an investor confidence crisis."
The golden age of computational materials science gives me a disturbing feeling of déjà vu
BTW This critical article has been delinked from reddit, as it "does not include references to new, peer-reviewed research"
How the Flawed Journal Review Process Impedes Paradigm Shifting Discoveries
Peter Higgs doubts that a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”
Scientists believe hockey players may communicate by banging sticks against boards - this would score high here or here
How science goes wrong, trouble at the lab, looks good on paper - and has been for some time.
How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science
Scientific Data is Disappearing at Alarming Rate - Wasting Valuable Research Funds
Bullying in academia: Researcher sheds some light on how bullying is becoming increasingly common in academia
Fake paper published by fake students passes 'peer review', gets published and gets pulled off the site a few hours after the 'international conference' is exposed as a scam.
This conference is a return to rational physics in terms that are comprehensible to any educated person, not just a small group of specialists. Contemporary physics has lost contact with physical reality. Mysticism and fancy has resulted in quite irrational notions being proposed to account for the physical Universe.
On scientific integrity Phenomenologist Jay Wacker has a blog at Quora, called Particle Physics Digressions. The latest entry is an odd tale of something which Wacker says it’s not exceptional, happens everyday.
Excellence by Nonsense: The Competition for Publications in Modern Science
Reputational damage: The reckless pursuit of rank threatens the academy’s future, argues Roger Brown
Young 'pranksters' skewed landmark sexuality study, faking homosexuality
Studies with financial conflicts of interest are 5x more likely to find no link between sugary drinks and weight gain.
New Truths That Only One Can See
Between 2005 and 2011, nearly half of all new drug formulations in the US were approved without companies having to demonstrate a tangible benefit
'Extreme' workloads plague scientists at the start of their careers. Across the world, recent PhDs with non-tenure jobs complained that more than half of their work hours was spent on duties other than research.
It's not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It's a lack of job opportunities.
So, now the same scientists, who avoided the work in cold fusion research for whole decades are now crying, they've not enough jobs. Despite whole the mess of the contemporary society (I mean energetic and subsequent economical crisis) is just a result of their twenty years (if not eighty years) standing ignorance of cold fusion.
They should be jailed for it - not to get a new jobs. Like any other parasite & parasite of human society.
In a huge, grandiose convention center I found about 200 extremely conventional-looking scientists, almost all of them male and over 50. In fact some seemed over 70, and I realized why: The younger ones had bailed years ago, fearing career damage from the cold fusion stigma. I have tenure, so I don't have to worry about my reputation. But if I were an assistant professor, I would think twice about getting involved. Actually the modern scientists avoid the controversial topics like the devil is afraid of the cross. Only these established ones or those aged ones (who already have nothing to lose) are brave enough for to pursue new routes of research. For those who don't believe me - this is how LENR workshops and conferences looks like (1, 2, 3,...). Just show me some young people there...
Technological Innovations in Statistics EducationEnter R Markdown, a statistical package that integrates seamlessly with the programming language R
Group-think : Collective delusions in organizations and markets
Despite the mainstream science denies the negative effects of flurides to human psychic, new Harward study links fluoride, other chemicals to erosion of child IQs.
Federal Investigations Reveal Academic Backstabbing at Purdue University (pages)
The urge to publish in top journals is harming research: "In keeping with the current winner-takes-all economics of science, impact factor mania benefits a few, creates many losers, and distorts the process of science" For example, the high impact journals officially don't accept the experimental work without formal theory and or cold fusion/LENR research.
How to Burst the "Filter Bubble" that Protects Us from Opposing Views
Stanford opening new lab to study bad science
Post a Comment