Geometry of String Theory and Dark Energy, page 13

Originally posted by jim_w

This is simply not true. If the anomolous data is reliable then scientists will jump on it - anomolous data is what makes new theories, and new theories are what scientists live for. Peolpe who say this kind of thing about scientists have clearly not met many... Every scientist I know would cream his jeans for data which disagree with an established theory.

We will have to agree to disagree here, and I have soooo many examples too. How well received was Copernicus or Galileo? Did you know that Scientific American published a piece debunking the Wright brothers heavier than air device even after it was flown in front of hundreds of witnesses?

There have been eyewitnesses who saw the Smithsonian dump tons of anomolous artifacts into the sea.

In more recent times we can look at how Podkletnov's gravity shielding experiment was suppressed or how MIT deliberately fudged their data to make cold fusion look bad so as not to threaten millions of dollars of hot fusion funding.

I have an acquaintance who developed a fairly conventional but commercially viable hydrogen conversion unit for automobiles. The hydrogen could be obtained from a solar cell setup he was also selling. The end result was that his equipment and manufacturing site was shut down by the government. They said it was 'bad for the economy'.

The history of energy device suppression in long and sordid.

Energy Suppression

Completely false. Scientists explicitly acknowledge that no theory is completely true. The whole point of modern science is that different theories work on different scales - look at renomormalization. Every scientist on the planet will agree with you that "physical laws are only approximations good for a certain range of parameters".

They may 'agree' in principle, but the behavior is quite a bit different depending on what field you care to examine. Again this really goes back to the original point. Once a theory becomes well accepted by the mainstream and there is a sufficient amount of work that depends on it, alternative theories will be fought against with religious fervor.

One of my favorite little examples is the status of Weber's force law. It fell into disuse because at first it was thought to be inconsistent with Maxwells equations. This is now known to be false, it is completely consistent. Nevertheless we are stuck with the Lorenz force law which fails to predict the internal force seen by a wire carrying a large current. Weber's law predicts this correctly. Interestingly if they had kept Weber's law, the classical proton/electron model does not break down. It even predicts an attractive force between like charges if they are brought close enough together. Perhaps quantum mechanics would have looked very different if not for a few early political decisions. There are many other examples like this in many other areas of science.

[edit on 17-10-2007 by SevenThunders]