> I'm going to try to pull all the sub-threads
>together, and answer the objections here.
>
> History shows that many scientists are indeed
>closed-minded. Here's a quote from Lord Kelvin,
>who was a very prominent (and good) scientist,
>from 1895: "Heavier-than-air flying machines are
>impossible."

Yup. This happens. Supposedly "scientists" also said breaking the sound barrier was impossible, and running a sub-four-minute mile was also impossible.

First of all, Lord Kelvin does not speak for all of science. Sure, he was a famous and influential scientist. I bet a lot of laypeople of the time totally believed him when he said heavier than air flight was impossible. But I guaran-damn-tee you that there was no conspiracy, large scale or otherwise, to shun or surpress research into heavier than air flight. And all it took to change even the most misguided person's opinion on heavier than air flight was two bike mechanics taking a thirteen second hop in their crazy contraption. You demonstrate beyond a doubt that something is possible, and nobody can freaking deny it. It's not going to be surpressed. You're not going to the gulag for it. The Wright Flyer is hanging in the Smithsonion today. And the Wrights were far from the only people working on the problem. There were hundreds of others, many who claim to have even beaten the Wrights to powered flight.

One scientist saying something is impossible means nothing. In fact, I've remember reading (sorry, no cite) about a famous physicist (I'm thinking it was Stephen Hawking, but I'm unsure) who loves to take sides on controversial issues in his field. He'll say "X is not possible" or "Y is the answer to question Z" without any real proof, specifically BECAUSE he knows that other scientists will get a stick in their craw about such proclamations and will go and devise experiments to prove or disprove him. If he's proven right, he looks like a genius. If he's proven wrong, well, he delivered the necessary kick in the pants to some young grad student to take up the gauntlet he threw down and make a name for himself by proving the "great Stephen Hawking" (or whoever) wrong.

More important, but still not of supreme importance, is the consensus opinion of all scientists. As a lay person, the best I can hope to do is look at the consensus opinion of all scientists in a field about a particular area of research in order to make any judgement about it for myself. If the consensus opinion is negative, then I'm forced to conclude there's not much to the claims.

Of course, the real test is truth. All the scientists in the world can say something is impossible, but if someone does it, then it's not impossible, is it? There's still plenty of research going on in the area of cold fusion. If there's anything at all to it, I guarantee it'll come to light eventually. Nobody can hold down the truth forever, and I seriously, seriously doubt there's any sort of conspiracy in the scientific community to hold down evidence of cold fusion. Why the hell would they? Who *wouldn't* want to be known as the scientist who solved the world's energy problem??

>Pronouncements like this tend to
>occur because many people make the mistake of
>thinking that because something is impossible
>today, and will probably be impossible 10 or 100
>years from now, means that it will always be
>impossible. This is from one of Dave's
>responses: "You know what happens when you do an
>experiment that is repeatable and rigorous, and
>disproves a long-standing theory?
> You win a Nobel Prize."
> But what if scientists think so little of the
>evidence that they don't bother repeating the
>experiment?

This counter-claim about scientists ignoring evidence bugs me so much, because it just doesn't happen the way you seem to think it does. What happened when Pons and Fleischmann held their press conference? Did all the chemists and phycisists in the world go "ho hum, that just can't be true, so I will not bother to check into it." Freaking hell NO they didn't. Pretty much every major University in the WORLD rushed to do their own version of the experiment. A few claimed anomolous heat much like Pons and Fleischmann reported, but later retracted those claims because of experimental error or margin of error issues. The vast majority of scientists got nothing but some wet palladium rods.

Here's a little thought experiment for you. Suppose I tell you that a steel toe boot will protect you from an anvil dropped on your foot. I claim to have done the test with my own foot, and look, no damage! So you go ahead and try the experiment, only you get your toes broken. You hobble back to me and I say "Oh, see, you were using the wrong brand of steel toe boots. Try again." You correct the error, repeat, more crushed toes. You come back to me, and I tell you "Well, it doesn't work *every* time. You have to keep repeating it, you'll see the effect eventually." How many times are you going to drop that anvil on your foot before you decide my claims aren't really interesting enough for you to pursue?

>Science has a long and sordid history of ignoring
>evidence that does not fit established theory.
>Example: the platypus. The platypus would have
>been "discovered" long before it officially was,
>had contemporary scientists been worthy of the
>name. Even stuffed specimens were called frauds,
>simply because they violated what science "knew"
>had to be true. Another example: one of the
>great apes--I don't remember which one.
>Scientists had eyewitness accounts from the
>native people going back decades, but ignored
>them because they "knew" that such an animal did
>not exist.

Yup, science has a history of biases. One of those biases is that western scientists put greater weight on the claims of other western scientists than those of native people. This has been chalked up as a racial bias, and that may even be true. But "natives" the world over have literally thousands of different claims about "impossible" creatures such as lake monsters, dragons, thunderbirds, great apes, and pandas. Are they all true? Not hardly. But here's the thing though. We found the platypus. We found the mountain gorrilla. We found the panda. We've never found the thunderbird, or Mokele-mbembe. This tells me science works DESPITE certain biases that have existed in the past and may exist in the present. The truth wins out eventually.

Besides that, stuffed specimens are not at all good evidence of existence for an unknown animal. They're just about sixteen jillion times easier to fake than an actual whole carcass (or even better, a living specimen) and you can't learn nearly as much about the creature when his insides have been ripped out and replaced with wire and stuffing.


> Dave also mentioned Einstein. But he rejected
>the idea of quantum mechanics because he didn't
>like some of the things that it predicted.

Yup. But he did it within the bounds of science. He tried desperately to reconcile QM with classical mechanics. He proposed thought experiments that he felt disproved QM. The most famous is the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paradox. Briefly, the EPR paradox deals with quantum entanglement. Two particles that have interacted in the past have a property (such as their spin) that is "entangled", meaning if one has a spin of +x, the other must have a spin of -x. In classical mechanics, this is explained by the fact that these two spins were set when the two particles interacted. QM, however, says that the spin of a particle isn't set and can't be known until it is measured. Einstein (and Podolsky and Rosen) argued this lead to faster than light "communication" between the two particles by positing a thought experiment, whereby the two entangled particles are allowed to seperate by a great distance, and then the spin of one is measured. If you measure a spin of +x, you now know that the other particle must have a spin of -x. However, since QM says that the property of spin is indeterminate until something is measured, that means somehow your measuring the spin of the particle in front of you had an instantaneous effect on a particle a hillion jillion miles away.

Einstein put forth this thought experiment as a challenge to QM. Today, we now use it as an example to show how QM violates "common sense" intuition, because it has been shown that this indeed DOES happen. Nobody is 100% sure how, and it's been shown that there's no way to use this method for faster than light communication, but nevertheless, Einstein's objection was really 100% true.

The point is, Einstein didn't just reject QM out of hand. He tried with all of his prodigious ability to show that it was wrong, and COULDN'T. This is, to me, a great example of science working as intended, not an example of scientists being a bunch of naysayers and group thinkers.

>
> Another topic: UFO's. Many scientists will
>readily admit that intelligent life probably
>exists elsewhere in the universe. They just
>don't think that it's visiting us. Why? Because
>feasible space travel is not possible for the
>human population, and will not be for many years.
>Therefore, they flatly state that "true" UFO's
>cannot exist.

Bah. I call bull on this. I'm not saying no scientist has ever said this. But as a whole, scientists tend to reject UFOs as evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence simply from a complete lack of credible evidence standpoint, not because they deem interstellar travel impossible.

>They absolutely refuse to consider the likely
>level of technology that an intelligent species
>even 1,000 years ahead of us would have.

No they don't.

Here's the thing. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Here's what you need to do. Bring in a dead alien. Bring in some actual wreckage from a downed craft. Show evidence of SOMETHING other than unexplained lights in the sky (hey, we don't understand a lot of well-documented atmospheric phenomenon. Unexplained lights in the sky could be just about anything. Claiming they're spacecraft from another planet is a huge leap.) No "mainstream" scientists that I know of study UFOs today because, as Darien said in another post, it's already been studied. The Air Force did it. Many Universities had similar studies. They found no evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. Sure, they found a bunch of sitings they couldn't explain. But it's a HUGE, irresponsible leap to go from "something I can't explain" to "OMG ALIENS".

-- Dave