Chris Peterson wrote:Sputnick wrote:=Chris - Nobody has done that to the satisfaction of most scientists.
Because the programming will not allow that to easily happen.
You know, there is nothing scientists desire more than to make a pivotal new discovery. That's how you win a Nobel Prize. You don't do it by following the herd. Every scientist is out there trying to break new ground. It isn't hard in today's scientific world to change consensus- assuming you can make the case. An interesting idea isn't enough. You need concrete evidence that your idea is better than the status quo. Consensus shifts all the time. When you see theories that remain stable for decades or longer, there's usually a very good reason, and it has nothing to do with "programmed" scientists.
It has struck me that there's a certain irony here ... a thread about "Dark Energy", Sputnick's comments about dogma, religion, close-mindedness, programming, etc, etc, etc ... and yet two teams of astronomers publish results of extensive observations (of Type Ia supernovae), independently yet almost simultaneously, that seem to support something pretty darn dramatic, new, astonishing, revolutionary, mold-breaking, paradigm-shifting, etc.
Am I alone in seeing the irony?
Sputnick, in what way does (did) the work of the Supernova Cosmology Project team and the High-z Supernova Search Team conform to your idea of science?
How, in respect of your approach to science, does (did) the work of these two teams not illustrate - well - the points that Chris P has been making?
Recall that, before these two teams' papers, there was no evidence - in peer-reviewed papers published in relevant journals - that "Dark Energy" was a concept with backing from observation or experiment. So here is a (radical) idea that went from nowhere to acceptance, with observational backing, in just a few short years. How do you think it would have been written up in 'that book', had it been published in 2008, rather than the early 1990s?
