I've only scanned this thread very briefly, so forgive me if I've missed anything significant. The immediate impression I come away with, though -- already a tedious pattern on this site -- is the defenders of science railing against what they see as cranks and morons (e.g. Magical and Yazata) who
just don't understand what science is all about, giving them a good telling off -- "You understand nothing about science!! Now let me tell you what science really is!"
The defenders of science then proceed to propagate and perpetuate fairy tales; --
absolute nonsense -- some idealized version of science, some
propaganda, that they've been brainwashed with, bearing little or no resemblance to the real world.
I won't mention any names (but just search the thread, say, for the words "dogma" and "unfalsifiable" to locate suspects). I will tell you the reason why these fairy tales are being perpetuated, though:
an appalling and inexcusable -- for any person supposedly educating others on science --
ignorance of the philosophy and history of science.
We could talk all night, but for now I'll just focus on two issues:
1. Falsifiability - In a nutshell what we're told is: "Your crap is unfalsifiable. Good science must be falsifiable."
(cf. "
If not, how could that possibly be used to justify a knowledge claim? It's not repeatable or testable. It's unfalsifiable." - post #42)
It has been widely recognized for sixty years or more that scientific theories are unfalsifiable. Karl Popper's philosophy of science turned out to be hopelessly inadequate. A great many defenders of science, evidently, have
still not received the memo, and
still continue to propagate fairy tales and propaganda.
Scientists may
say that their theories are falsifiable, perhaps some of them even
believe it sincerely. E.g. "If X is observed then Theory Y has been shown to be false." The observation of X does
not show that Theory Y is false, and there is not a single example in the entire history of science of the whole scientific community declaring a major theory to be false due to a theory-prediction mismatch. What typically happens in such circumstances is that, rather than declaring a
falsification (which has not occurred in any case), scientists will try to find some way to
reconcile awkward evidence with a cherished theory, indeed it's unlikely to be regarded as awkward evidence
at all. General relativity was neither falsified, nor declared to be falsified, by the discovery of galaxies behaving in a manner seemingly at odds with the predictions of GR. Dark matter was postulated instead to
reconcile the mismatch. Examples like this could be multiplied virtually
ad infinitum.
I could explain the reasons for all this in more depth, but no one around here ever listens anyway (lol). Fairy tales are preferred to awkward truths. For now just read this:
"But the field known as science studies (comprising the history, philosophy and sociology of science) has shown that falsification cannot work even in principle.
[ . . . ]
But if you propagate a “myth-story” enough times and it gets passed on from generation to generation, it can congeal into a fact, and falsification is one such myth-story. It is time we abandoned it."
It’s time we abandoned the notion
www.scientificamerican.com
2. Dogma - In a nutshell what we're told is: "There is none in science. It's the very antithesis of what science is all about."
(cf. "
Science operates on the assumption that anything we think we know could turn out to be wrong. That's the opposite of dogma." - post #107)
In another nutshell we're also told there is no crime in the Soviet Union, no poverty in North Korea, and no homosexuality in Iran.
Who are you trying to kid !!??
Never mind, I'll let the scientists speak for themselves . . .
"When a scientific theory is firmly established and confirmed it changes its character and becomes a part of the metaphysical background of the age: a doctrine is transformed into a
dogma"
- Max Born (Nobel prize laureate in physics, 1954)
"Now to the field of physics as it presented itself at the time [late 19th century]. In spite of great productivity in particulars,
dogmatic rigidity prevailed in matters of principle: In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton's laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces."
[ . . . ]
"Even Maxwell and and H. Hertz, who in retrospect are properly recognized as those who shook the faith in mechanics as the final basis of all physical thinking, in their conscious thinking consistently held fast to mechanics as the confirmed basis of physics. It was Ernst Mach who, in his History of Mechanics, upset this
dogmatic faith; this book exercised a profound influence upon me in this regard while I was a student."
-- Albert Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes"
"Not everyone agreed [that space and time are absolute]. Some argued persuasively that it made little sense to ascribe existence to something you can't feel, grasp, or affect. But the explanatory and predictive power of Newton's equations quieted the critics. For the next two hundred years, his absolute conception of space and time was
dogma."
- "The Fabric of the Cosmos", Brian Greene, p8
"I am usually reluctant to engage in discussions about the meaning of quantum theory, because I find that the experts in this area have a tendency to speak with
dogmatic certainty, each of them convinced that one particular solution to the problem has a unique claim to be the final truth.
- Freeman J. Dyson, essay "Thought Experiments in Honor of John Archibald Wheeler"
In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know.” The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions.
Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why
heretics who question the dogmas are needed.
— Freeman J. Dyson, Frederick S. Pardee Distinguished Lecture (Oct 2005)
"At a news conference at Rockefeller yesterday, Dr. Blobel said there were many disappointments in the 30 years of research, ''such as when your grants and papers are rejected because some stupid reviewer rejected them for
dogmatic adherence to old ideas.'' His remarks drew thunderous applause from the hundreds of sympathetic colleagues and younger scientists who packed the auditorium. ''What keeps you going are the little blips of excitement every three to four years,'' he said."
- Günter Blobel (Nobel prize laureate in medicine, 1999)
"[John] Clauser recalled that during his student days "open inquiry into the wonders and peculiarities of quantum mechanics" that went beyond the Copenhagen interpretation was "virtually prohibited by the existence of various religious stigmas and social pressures, that taken together, amounted to an evangelical crusade against such thinking."
-- "Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the great debate about the nature of reality", Manjit Kumar, p356
(John Clauser was the first person to experimentally test Bell's theorem)
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