"There have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on–with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before?
Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using– not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running."
The similar mistake was done before 130+ years when comparing Michelson-Morley experiments concerning light spreading in vacuum to spreading of waves in material fields. By using of these experiments was deduced, vacuum doesn't behave like material field, because it doesn't exhibit a reference frame for motion (in fact it does it via weak Lense-Thirring effect in Aether density gradients and/or various supersymmetry phenomena due space-time expansion - but this is another story). But the conditions of both experiments weren't equivalent. The observation of light wave spreading by using of light waves in Michelson-Morley experiment is NOT an equivalent of observation of material wave by using of light waves, because two kinds of waves are involved in later experiment with compare to former one.
In such way, mainstream science did the similar mistake when interpreting M-M experiment, like Mr. Young did, because these two experiments weren't done in analogous way, i.e. under consistent arrangement. The physicists just believed, they're doing analogous experiments in similar way, like native people engaging in imitative behavior of "cargo cult". Only one person in Einsteinian era was supposedly capable to spot the difference, i.e. Oliver Lodge - but his opinions were widely ignored both by aetherists, both by mainstream science due his tendency to occultism and paranormal phenomena in his later age.
Anyway, it's crazy situation - at least from present perspective of the future of science history..
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Cargo Cult Scence by Donald Simanek:
"I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen" he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result."
Science is not an economic problem - it's a solution
I believe too, the further existence of human civilization depends on progress in science. But the investments into science must be scientific, i.e. highly rational, too. We cannot spent all our money for research of Pluto planet just because it's interesting and possible - some priorities in research funding must exist here. For example the relative advance in collider research is the product of cold war and arm race and it's separated from real needs of society. So far, after fifty years of collider research we have no usage for any of hundreds of particle, prepared in colliders - so it's evident, the usefulness of such research will be quite limited in further fifty years, too. In particular cases, such too advanced research could even become dangerous for civilization, because of various supersymmetry effects..
Whereas extremely important findings in cold fusion or room temperature superconductivity are simply overlooked for many years (compare the Arata's or J.F.Prins's research) - although we can find immediate usage for it! Such principal imbalance is what makes investments into science ineffective. Science is not supposed to be a salary generator for limited group of privileged scientists - it's purpose is to help the rest of society - or the society wouldn't help the scientists at the case of financial crisis.
People are like dogs. Whenever they see new things or look at themselves in the mirror, a part of their reality comes unscrewed..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3xdcx2WUcU
Is "publish or perish" biasing science?
The authors of the new study proposed their own hypothesis on the publication of negative results: researchers in a competitive environment, who are most sensitive to the "publish or perish" mentality that prevails in the sciences, would be less likely to publish papers that describe negative results.
Biophysicist Stuart Lindsay:[i] "...the truth about science is that most funding supports incremental advances, because the community will accept that they can do them. This means that the big breakthroughs are very difficult to support..".. [/i]Dense aether theory explains this way of information through human society to spreading of waves, which can penetrate only subtle gradients of density. If these gradients are more pronounced, then the refraction or even reflection will occur. Big ideas are often misinterpreted or politicized, or simply ignored or denied. We could even measure the importance of new ideas & findings by obstinacy, in which they're ignored or denied.
Is "publish or perish" biasing science toward gradualism?
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/is-publish-or-perish-biasing-science.ars
When the scientific evidence is unwelcome, people try to reason it away.
What do people do when confronted with scientific evidence that challenges their pre-existing view? Often they will try to ignore it, intimidate it, buy it off, sue it for libel or reason it away.
Taylor & Francis has been testing CrossCheck for 6 months on submissions to three of its science journals. In one, 21 of 216 submissions, or almost 10%, had to be rejected because they contained plagiarism; in the second journal, that rate was 6%; and in the third, 13 of 56 of articles (23%) were rejected after testing, according to Rachael Lammey, a publishing manager at Taylor & Francis’s offices in Abingdon, UK.
What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t
The bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.
Privatising the Peer Review Process?
Backlash against multitasking: Are young scientists
being asked to master too many 'soft skills' in addition to their research? Scientists are increasingly asked to master skills in addition to their research. This is not necessarily a good thing, says Gene Russo.
I can fully agree with it.
But it's all the consequence, scientists are doing science for jobs, not for new finding in increased rate. If they're earning money with doing science, they need1
As the result, new articles are highly schematic and formal, they don't bring new ideas and/or findings - just a pile of void equations without physical meaning, which are soon covered with another layers of useless informational junk.
Faking it: Where science goes wrong
Scientists make all their data public immediately instead of hoarding it to advance their careers. It resulted into first meaningful progress on Alzheimer's in decades. It may become the new publishing model of Academia.
Is Academia Inhospitable to Big Discoveries? You can't write a grant proposal whose aim is to make a theoretical breakthrough.
It is common practice among young astrophysicists these days to invest research time conservatively in mainstream ideas that have already been explored extensively in the literature. This tendency is driven by peer pressure and job market prospects, and is occasionally encouraged by senior researchers. Although the same phenomenon existed in past decades, it is alarmingly more prevalent today because a growing fraction of observational and theoretical projects are pursued in large groups with rigid research agendas.
Why Scientific Studies Are So Often Wrong: The Streetlight Effect
Many, and possibly most, scientists spend their careers looking for answers where the light is better rather than where the truth is more likely to lie..
The glorious mess of real scientific results
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