Revolutionary Science

I don't know and certainly don't care.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I should think not.Science also has a violent, knee-jerk conservative mindset toward ideas which turn out to be totally wrong.This is kind of how we tell them apart.Of course, if only God by his good grace would stick a big halo over the ideas which are going to turn out to be revolutionary, this part of the scientific method could be skipped. I'm not quite sure I follow you. Are you suggesting that their motivation is idleness?The whole profession of scientists is to find out things they didn't previously know, one more time wouldn't kill them.You imagine ... what? ... a bunch of professors saying: "Well, if we accept his theory, then we'll have to read his book!""Urgh, yes. Not much of a reader myself, either.""And I've heard that some of the math is really hard.""Yeah. Toss another copy of Nature on the fire, would you."I mean, what? You use the example of Wegener.Of course you do. Who doesn't?Why is it always Wegener?Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I have no idea what I'd have thought of Wegener's hypothesis had I been a geologist in the 1920's --- how about you? I think I might have had a little chuckle at the man who measured Greenland's speed in miles per year, and whose theory of how continents move was demonstrably wrong.Why is it always, always Wegener?Who'd be your second pick, if you couldn't use him as an example?I'll put up ten scientific revolutionaries who were honored and lauded in their lifetimes for every one you can find who got nothing but kicks. I have an easy way of locating them, since Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously. We may note that poor martyred Wegener had a professorship specially created for him at an Austrian University; that his leading place in climatology was universally recognized; and that his work on climatology became the standard textbook. He died aged 50 leading a scientific expedition to Greenland. It's not like anyone threatened to, ooh, say, burn him at the stake, or something like that. But that people said mean things about continental drift, I will concede.

Read any Kuhn lately?

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

Yes, also Popper and Nagel and Wittgenstein and bleedin' Plato.But what are you trying to say?Apparently, you think that something in my previous post was wrong.You try to point this out by saying: "Read any Kuhn lately?"Which bit of Kuhn is a response to which bit of my post? Please give the quotation, and let's discuss it.

Sorry about that, but you mentioning Wittgenstein and Plato in the same sentence triggered a reflex response.Certainly if Magueijo's idea is correct this would amount to a paradigm shift. It seems to me that one of the big hurdles to overcome in any paradigm shift is that those who have worked their whole lives under the previous paradigm are emotionally and intellectually wedded to it, and the natural human reaction to a challenge to anything that one is wedded to in that way is dismissal of it. IIRC, Kuhn suggested that revolutionary ideas often gain acceptance, not by winning over the establishment, but by new entrants into the field being able to assess the new idea without filtering it through a lifetime's work operating under the previous paradigm.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

I still have trouble seeing Magueijo as anything other than a latter-day Velikovsky and a fellow traveler of creationists. He apparently cites lots of evidence, but isn't it all of the negative kind? I get the impression that he does a lot of, "Modern cosmology is wrong about this, it's wrong about that, inflation is just a patch on a bad theory, etc." (I'm paraphrasing, of course)If Magueijo has a legitimate complaint it seems it would be about Big Science. While few believe we're approaching the limits of scientific knowledge, I think many would agree that the principle of diminishing returns is now a significant factor in scientific inquiry. Scientific advances take more time, effort and money than they used to, because most of the easier ideas have already been explored. What if Magueijo's ideas have genuine merit, but it would take a billion dollar project to explore them. If no others become convinced that his ideas have merit, then the ideas may never get explored.The days of Wegener, when a scientist could gather data for a revolutionary idea on a shoestring budget, are over. For the most part, mavericks can no longer afford to explore their ideas on their on. Does this mean that modern science now hinders its own progress because it has shut itself off from the contributions of renegades and mavericks?--Percy

I can't see how Magueijo cna be seen as a "fellow-traveller" of the creationists. True some YEC's try to claim that his ideas are like Setterfield's wretched arguments, but both the evidence used and what is proposed are very different. Magueijo is working in cosmology and his ideas apply to events billions of years before the Earth existed - Setterfield argues that the speed of light was still changing in the relatively recent past.He isn't another Velikovsky - he's qualified. His ideas may well be wrong - but we don't know that yet. Velikovsky's ideas were laughably wrong and known to be laughably wrong when they were published. He had a fellowship at Cambridge which doesn't just give them away to unqualified loons and according to Wikipedia he's currently a lecturer in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College (another highly-rated institution). He might turn into another Hoyle - but that is something that has yet to be seen.

I see him as a fellow-traveler not for his ideas but for his approach. Is he proposing testable ideas that aren't getting funded because his they haven't yet found any significant acceptance? Or is he just lambasting the scientific community for not seeing his genius?I haven't read the book, but just the fact that it exists is suspicious. Scientists with legitimate ideas don't take their arguments to the lay public. That's what creationists do.--Percy

I haven't read the book, but my understanding is that he is not promoting his ideas as necessarily true. He is complaining that it is verydifficult to get his work published and apparently he's quite rude about it to the point where the British edition was actually changed to avoid legal action.As I've mentioned before cosmology is a very speculative area of physics with a lot of emphasis on theoretical work. I don't know how testable Maguejiro's ideas are, but to the best of my knowledge the main alternatives (inflation and the ekpyrotic theory) also have serious problems producing practical tests.I don't think that Maguejiro is taking his wortk to the public instead of to the scientific community as creationists do. I think he's doing both, and that Maguejiro accepts that it is the scientific community's verdict that counts. Creationists - including the ID movement - want to make an end run around scientiifc acceptance and focus almost entirely on producing popular works.

As subbie suggests I'm not sure that anyone does do this. But if you wanted too all you would need to do is set up the equipment used to empirically measure light generally and focus the light from a stellar source using an optical telescope. Additionally if you didn't want to have to correct for changes in speed as the light passed through the atmosphere you could set the equipment up in space.TTFN,WK

I'm quite confused by this. We are 100 years beyond saying... ooh, let's tweak this, or what would happen if we let this happen. Theoretical physics works by considering entire paradigms that produce potential universes whole-sale: GR originally and now Sugra, String/M-Theory, Loop Gravity, etc. Within these, pretty much anything can happen. Nothing is sacrosanct. So I really don't understand his complaint. And this doesn't explain his inability to publish. And anyone can publish on LANL so I guess I should go off and have a look at his LANL publications that haven't been accepted for journal publication.He must be talking about getting funding for experimental physics. Well, if he has a theory that is somehow superior to the current Standard Model AND makes differentiating predictions within the limits of current experimental observability, then I would have thought there would be a hoard of TPs echoing his call. All very strange.

Ok, should have checked LANL before posting And I really should read his book. But I do think he has put himself in a very bad light with the kind of publicity he has attracted, such as in your opening post. The conclusions you have drawn are evidence of that.It does seem to be a TP vs EP battle... [I'm interpreting this as] he thinks he has enough reasons (and he is not alone, and has some heavy-ish weights along with him) to push for experimental time and funding, which is not forthcoming, possibly for the very reasons he cites. EPs have never liked us TPs, and they are much more conservative, almost by definition. Then again, he may just be being paranoid.But, no crank... reasonably respectable TP, getting annoyed rightly or wrongly at the EP fraternity. It will be the same when we start claiming that M-theory or LG has testable predictions.[ABE sorry if anyone was confused by my abbreviations - I was in a hurry!TP - Theoretical Physics/Physicists
EP - Experimental Physics/Physicists
LANL - Los Alamos National Laboratory on-line preprint archive where all papers are submitted for universal access the moment they are finished. Probably the biggest revolution in academic research of the past century, in that response-time to preprints diminished from months to minutes.]Edited by cavediver, : Clarity of abbreviations

Percy, here's why I have to disagree with your label of "fellow traveler." In my mind the defining characteristic of a creo (put in general terms) is trying to appear scientific but ignoring virtually every tenet of scientific discipline in pursuing the goal of advancing a belief system for reasons that have nothing to do with the scientific value of the system. As far as anyone here has said, or anything else I've read, (which isn't much, really) he doesn't seem to fit that mold.Iconoclastic? Antiestablishment? Wrong? Perhaps. But it doesn't sound like he's a charlatan in the creo fashion. And to me, lumping him in with the creos just because he may level some of the same criticisms as creos do of the scientific establishment (perhaps for different reasons) does him a disservice.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

I agree with you subbie. Although I have practically zilch knowledge of cosmology, based on the OP I'd put this guy on the "borderlands" vice the "pseudoscience/nonscience" side of Shermer's triad (Michael Shermer, 2001, The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense, Oxford Uni Press). He seems to be following accepted practice (after all, Wilson/MacArthur published the Theory of Island Biogeography as a book, not a journal article), and merely comes across as curmudeonly (like Griffin in Animal Minds - where he spends the first two chapters whining about other scientists). Borderlands - may be wrong, may be right. May become "science", may disappear into obscurity.

Yes, but let's not forget that Kuhn was wrong. This is one of the reasons why it's always, always, always bleedin' Wegener who's used as an example.Einstein was a much greater revolutionary, but you can't use him.Rutherford? The very word atom means unsplittable, but when he discovered the atomic nucleus in 1907, he got a Nobel Prize in 1908.What could be more preposterous than the claim that parity is not preserved? --- yet Yang and Lee get a Nobel Prize a year after this was demonstrated.The idea of a stable and stationary universe was so engrained in scientific thought that Einstein famously fudged in the "cosmological constant" to make it so. The interval between Einstein rejecting Lemaitre's work on the Big Bang, and Einstein calling it "the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened" was a mere six years. It was not necessary to wait for Einstein to retire so that unbiased eyes could look at it afresh.Science and scientists do not fit neatly into Kuhn's cookie-cutter, and a good thing too.