From physicist Jon Butterworth at The Guardian:
Jan Conrad, an astroparticle physicist, claims that “The field has cried wolf too many times and lost credibility”
and he worries that false discoveries are undermining public trust in science. He lists some dubious results which have caused a stir amongst physicists and the general public over the past couple of years, including the faster-than-light-neutrinos that weren’t, the primordial gravitational waves that are probably just dust, and several Dark Matter candidates which remain shrouded in uncertainty and contradiction.
His argument has some merit; in some cases there is an apparent rush to release, and especially to over-interpret, provisional and sometimes incorrect data. This is sometimes done because because of rivalries and competition, the desire to stake a claim. Other times it is simply that those concerned have found themselves too easy to fool. Such things can definitely distort the priorities of scientists and those who fund them. More.
My own response is, wakey, wakey.
Much of today’s public reasonably assumes that high science exists to support crackpot cosmology and its subsidiary theories, not to advance anything that would be remotely useful.
Not like moon landings, fMRI imaging, and the microwave oven.
More like some dweeb sci toff announcing on government TV that our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth. Which lets the toff out of a LOT of serious evaluation, right?
See also:
Hi, Nonsense, meet Budget
and
How it got so crazy.
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