3 ms·

Perhaps its a semantic thing, but isn't questioning everything instead of being a true believer the basis of science?

• stefantalpalaru 13y ago
  In theory, yes, but in practice it's highly unlikely that the vast majority of people would be able to duplicate experiments and verify results. And I'm not talking just about the "I fucking love science" crowd. Even people working in labs will have a very hard time finding resources to repeat an already published (and presumably correct) scientific experiment instead of doing new publishable work. For the rest of us it all boils down to trusting those held in respect by their peers and that is a belief system. Occasionally reinforced by shunning the nay-sayers as "anti-science"...
  • hga 13y ago
    You don't have to reproduce the results to implicitly verify them. As I understand it, the normal pattern is that if the results are important, researchers will do stuff based upon then, and if the results were wrong their experiments won't go right. Eventually they try reproducing the original to figure out what's wrong, and that can lead to people deciding the original was wrong. If the results aren't important, they don't tend to get built upon, they mostly just matter for someone getting tenure, the next grant, whatever.