Is he a genius, or a loon?
They laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
8 thoughts on “That Scientific Heretic”
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Is he a genius, or a loon?
They laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Comments are closed.
For some decades after relativity and quantum mechanics, science was pretty open to new ideas – they had, after all, just experienced what amounted to a revolution. When the rate of progress started to slow, however, the old prejudices set back in.
Hmm – another example: After Einstein had already abundantly proven himself an able scientist and a clear thinker, he was dismissed yet again, and treated as an old has-been when he raised objections to the Copenhagen consensus on quantum physics. While he may not have been able to come up with a means of solving the fundamental logical contradictions that he pointed out in Bohr’s picture, he nonetheless was correct in his warning that there were problems there. Bohr’s crowd simply rejected the necessity of realism or the idea that the universe has an actual coherent or logical state as important.
No one fixed these errors at the heart of quantum physics until Everett produced the universal wavefunction picture of quantum physics in the 50s (and was treated as a loon).
Rule of thumb is: How much does the heretic know about the established theories? Is he an expert or just a wannabe?
Breathe this deeply into your lungs . . . it is the best thing for you, it is called tabacco . . .
They say that science progresses one death at a time. Chandrasekhar was treated as a loon for 25 years, basically until Eddington died, before his ideas about neutron star formation were accepted, eventually receiving the Nobel in 83.
Lets see my theory does not work, so instead of saying the theory is wrong I’ll invent a whole bunch of invisible dark matter to make reality match my theory? Does anyone else see this as a sign of mass delusion?
I recently made a brief animation that relates to the topic — hope the link works and appears the same as in the preview below — Blackboard Theater Presents “Scientific Consensus.” Blackboard Theater Presents “Scientific Consensus.”
A good way to tell is if the person offers evidence, shares his methods, and acknowledges weaknesses in his theories, versus promoting assertions as established “fact”, dismissing skeptics as “deniers”, and omitting or downplaying any evidence which would tend to contradict the thesis.