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> If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility This is nonsense. Scientists have been wrong in several occasions, it is just
by coliveira 7y ago
> If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility
This is nonsense. Scientists have been wrong in several occasions, it is just part of the profession. For example, in the years leading to the discovery of relativity, many physicists believed there was something called "ether" that worked to fix the speed of light that they had evidence to be the same in all directions.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ShorsHammer 7y agoGenerally called aether, believe that ether is a misspelling which has lingered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
- chrisco255 7y agoYeah but that was in an age before clickbait and "In this house, we believe science is real" yard signs. People are too bought into science as a source for truth instead of being a messy, difficult method of discovery.
- ncmncm 7y agoWhen chemists were asked, at the end of the 19th century, whether the the atoms in their molecular diagrams were real, they always said, "No, that's just a model we use." It wasn't until Brownian motion needed actual atoms that they began to say atoms had objective reality. Cosmologists could learn a lot from 19th-century chemists.
- wallace_f 7y agoIt might be cultural. I think it is. Being unsure or humble is not valued as much as it should be.
- ncmncm 7y agoIt is valued more in more consequential fields. What cosmologists believe never has any legitimate effect on public policy, except to the degree that they command budgets for telescopes, accelerators, and detector arrays.
- mannykannot 7y agoI think there were a lot of chemists at that time who were confident that atoms are real, but an influential group of philosophically-minded physicists (Mach, for one) objected to the claim on the basis that the evidence was circumstantial. They gave Boltzmann a good deal of unnecessary grief over the matter (no pun intended).
- ncmncm 7y agoYes, all chemists suspected atoms were real, but they were mostly careful not to claim to have evidence for it that they did not, in fact, have -- yet! Nobody but nobody was surprised when we turned out to really have atoms. It was all a relief, but it didn't change much about how chemistry was conducted. It made catalysis easier to understand, and ultimately DNA as a physical basis for life that made biologists generally very uneasy. Many had thought of themselves as studying something divine, and had to get used to being chemists.
- mr_mitm 7y agoYou know what they say. Or at least what Lev Landau supposedly said: "Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt."