James I see your point ; although GMOs I simply don't trust the science . And anyway that's a whole different ball game . The thing is that Einstein had the word so to speak back then ; since most physists had no clue what he was talking about. Now we have become to think Einstein as infallible. As absolutely right . To question him is not acceptable. Many , many , many ; question his ideas and those who have expanded on his ideas . It is sort of thinking before the Renaissance. Where new ideas and thinking were discouraged .
All agree Einstein was certainly fallible. The many many examples of the expansion of his theories have been by professional experts in mainstream...not irrelevant lay person cranks on a science forum.
river: Which science, in particular, don't you trust? And why? It's true that Einstein's ideas took a while to "catch on", but the idea that they were at any time so complicated that only a few physicists could understand them is more of a kind of urban myth. I'm not sure who this "we" is that you are talking about. Working physicists all know that Einstein was not infallible. He turned out to be quite wrong about aspects of quantum mechanics, despite his role in starting the ball rolling on the fundamental ideas of quantisation. Einstein also spent many of the later years of his life unsuccessfully searching for a unified theory, and most physicists these days don't believe that his approach to that was very constructive. Interestingly, we have one poster on sciforums, Farsight, who considers himself to be a kind of Einstein fundamentalist. Farsight insists that everything Einstein wrote about relativity is the last word on the subject, and that we should all ignore the 100 years of developments in Einstein's theories that have happened since then. It turns out, of course, that Farsight doesn't understand Einstein very well, let alone the 100 years of relativity post-Einstein. Einstein is a pop icon these days. People quote him on all kinds of things for which he was not any kind of expert. It is assumed that because he made brilliant advanced in one area, that he was therefore generally brilliant in all areas. That was not the case. Nobody is an expert in everything. Funnily enough, it is mostly non-physicists who idolise Einstein. Working physicists tend to have a more measured assessment of Einstein's contributions.
That's OK. You obtain your info from forum cranks, I'll stick to professional experts. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
So the name the author is more important than the idea ? pad ? So your objectivity is then non-existent.
You obtain your info from forum cranks, I'll stick to professional experts. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Now I suggest you stop trolling.
If you have an idea and S Hawking has the same idea and you post it off to a publisher, which submission would be looked at? May not be fair but probably that's the way it goes. Would you not take into account the author when considering a presentation. Alex
The journal would look at and review above. If one would be submitted after the other one was already published, and the reviewer would be a clever one who knows about the other publication, the second submission would be rejected as containing nothing new. Independent of who was the author. At least this is as it should be done.
Thank you for setting out how it should be done, but I once suggested that inclusion of the word ether in your paper would attract negative bias so I guess I haven't been a hermit long enough as I an still suspicious of humans. Thanks very much for pointing out what really goes on it is refreshing to have your input on science matters. The site is going well I can't contribute but I visit near every day. Alex
The thing is , is that so called science is political and therefore money based . It is those who control the money that set what theory is accepted and what theory is not ; and this is true through ALL mainstream ologies. It has been this way for 20 or 30 yrs. Science is political . Science ; at least in the mainstream , is a dumbed down science ; the real science , the advanced science , is hidden . river
The corporate interests in the US won years ago, and questioning the benefits or safety of any GMOs - ecological, medical, economic, any aspect - is spoken of in the respectable media in the same terms and in the same breath as questioning the benefits or safety of standard vaccines, denying climate change risks from CO2 boosting, etc. (e.g. in Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-liberals-war-on-science/ or Discover Magazine http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/c...cine-gmo-denial-treated-equally/#.V4a4bjcYI4M) That quote I posted - "It is the scientific consensus that GMOs are safe" - is word for word and without any qualification whatsoever the unanimously endorsed position of the moderators of another science forum similar to this one that I'm sure you know of, and completely representative of the official moderator position of at least one more such forum. The quote is from one of them, a PhD in some high level microbiological field. It is not out of context. The endorsement by the others there is explicit and overt, not tacit. Threads questioning the safety of GMOs - or even claimed benefits such as yield in specific circumstances - are routinely locked and removed, posters who insist on arguing any such points are warned and suspended, etc. - treated as cranks. Serious doubts about GMO safety or benefits, claims of observable ignorance and risk in the standard scientific stances, etc, is a crank position, in the US media and in the US public scientific discourse. And that's worth keeping in mind, when discussing such things as why cranks get angry.
iceaura: GMOs have not all be tested, and the ones that have been tested have not been tested under all conditions. And we've only had GMOs for a short time. I, for one, am not particularly motivated at this time to jump on the "all GMOs are obviously safe" bandwagon. The high probability is that some are safe and others are not safe. It seems to me that anybody making all-encompassing claims of GMO safety is speaking from a position of faith rather than knowledge. If that is the current state of play, I wonder how things got to that point in just a few years. What happened to environmentalist opposition to companies like Monsanto and its GMOs?
Why yes. And in fact your statement there is quite mild, compared with what can be said based on the circumstances and evidence. For example, it's not just that they haven't been tested under all circumstances, but that they haven't been tested under some very clearly relevant and immediately critical circumstances. No long term consumption study on a mammal that searched for unexpected effects has been performed, for any GMO, for example. And no labeling of food products has been permitted, nor are there any real controls on black market or import use - making epidemiological surveys almost impossible in the population most exposed so far. So the kinds of problems we saw with trans fats and food dyes, and are seeing with artificial sweeteners, - if they exist for some GMO - are currently hidden and unobservable. And that's just the direct medical harm to humans issue. See how easy it can be to become a crank? It's been that way from day one, in the US. All opposition to the deployment of any GMOs has been treated as some degree of crankery from day one, by the respectable scientific organizations and media in the US.
It's obviously very hard to be a total expert in any discipline. and requires years and years of effort and study. Real scientists know their limitations and work hard to understand the fields they chose. Cranks substitute their limited knowledge with anger, conviction and volume, then go preach their evangelistic Gospel to anyone that wants to listen. Generally their emotionally charged, rants are totally bereft of any evidence but plenty of accusations and claims of frauds and cover ups, that appeal to the dim witted. That coupled with the often repeated claim that mainstream science is a religion, or that any lay person that dares follow the professional and expert line in mainstream, is no more than parrotting. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Of course, they would rather have you parrot their own brand of dogmatic pseudoscience rubbish that this forum and others constantly receive. At the same time they seem to believe that constantly bombarding forums such as this with their crank ideas is making any difference to the scientific academia and society in general. Delusions of grandeur is the overwhelmingly general cause of their parroting nonsense, and the fanatical belief that they, and only they, are correct. All we need do is look at a couple of thread titles that have been posted on this forum, and the claims within that supposedly invalidate two areas of cosmology held in high regard. The reality of the situation not obvious to the cranks, is that in a month or two, those claims will be gathering dust and fading away due to the nonsense that they are.
That is the ideal. The practice, as we have seen with several matters of importance, is not always up to that standard. In particular, real scientists in new fields often fail to comprehend their field's limitations at any given time. That's common enough to be conventional wisdom. And that should lead to a different approach to supposed cranks than automatic dismissal, or insistence on expert standing and fiat authority.
This thread, even though received good responses, is in bad taste and irrelevant. The OP has admitted somewhere that he initiated this thread keeping me in mind, and took a 'no crank' position. But the funny part is few posts by me and OP's monster got woken up, he got extremely wild and angry despite an earlier claim of being nice, soft old man. So 'why do no-cranks get angry' could be an equally apt title for this thread. Crankiness or non crankiness has nothing to do with anger, that human trait. So why do people get angry is a relevant point for discussion.
