Ignorance of Science
- Thread starter DarthTimon
- Start date
So much for "Free Speech" in German Acadamia.
Doesn't surprise me - requiring adherence to orthodoxy seems very prevalent there. It's not much better in the UK. I found such an environment stultifying to work in, which is why I left it several decades ago.
Sabine mentions something changed in the 1970's on how Hypothesis Formulation & Evaluation works and how modern Academia is all about publishing junk science paper to feed the Academic Publishing treadmill to collect $$$.
Everybody is afraid to do real science and would rather participate in the Junk Paper Publishing Tread Mill.
Has it really gotten that bad since then?
So it would appear, but I have no current knowledge. It seems to be particularly bad in high energy and particle physics, with some research areas, such as astronomy and astrophysics, and other subjects less afflicted.
High energy physics is particularly prone to crankdom because the ability to prove it is getting further and further away.
To find a direct (non-extra-dimensional) signature of quantum gravity might require a collider the size of Earth or larger, and so then we end up relying on analogies like trying to do experiments to "prove" things with Bose-Einstein condensates or acoustic black holes and appealing to scalability laws, which should work but we don't know for sure.
Thus high energy theorists can have quite good careers churning out papers with titles like "Non-Perturbative Dynamics of Heterotic M-Theory on Calabi-Yau Manifolds with Fractional Flux Compactifications" knowing that they will never, ever be able to prove it but yet as they have beautiful math it's just plausible enough to continue getting grant money.
To find a direct (non-extra-dimensional) signature of quantum gravity might require a collider the size of Earth or larger, and so then we end up relying on analogies like trying to do experiments to "prove" things with Bose-Einstein condensates or acoustic black holes and appealing to scalability laws, which should work but we don't know for sure.
Thus high energy theorists can have quite good careers churning out papers with titles like "Non-Perturbative Dynamics of Heterotic M-Theory on Calabi-Yau Manifolds with Fractional Flux Compactifications" knowing that they will never, ever be able to prove it but yet as they have beautiful math it's just plausible enough to continue getting grant money.
A major mistake in the foundation of America's governmental system was, while supposedly mandating a separation of church and State, leaving a backdoor for the church to infiltrate the State anyway. The French Revolution did it better.
In which way?
They didn't just put a fence in front of the church, they kicked its teeth in while they were at it.
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