Quadibloc wrote:
On May 11, 2:36 am, Martin Brown
wrote:
Not necessarily. I know an amateur cactus grower held in such high
repute that for very rare new discoveries he is given some seed on the
very rational grounds that he is more likely to be able to propagate it
to flowering size more rapidly than the professionals at Kew.
I am not trying to give an absolute rule that says that all amateurs
must be incompetent. Merely that those whose works are published in
I am fighting against the common misconception that amateurs are
necessarily incompetant. An idea that you seemed to be espousing.
Your "qualified" electrical engineer may have scraped a pass in an exam
a couple of decades ago but I can think of some that I would not let
anywhere near my own fuse box. I once had to administer hot sweet tea to
an ashen grey electrocuted US service engineer who forgot that UK mains
was 240v and tested for live with moist fingers! Another plunged the
entire site into darkness by dropping a spanner into the wrong place!
peer-reviewed journals, those who hold impressive academic posts...
are, at least in the field of their specialty, a better foundation to
trust in to build your own self-consistent edifice of knowledge...
You are sailing dangerously close to an appeal to authority here.
You can have brilliant individuals with the highest academic credentials
who cannot teach students to save their lives. And they do have the
unfortunate effect of sounding exactly like the handwaving loons since
no one at their lectures can follow their reasoning. Relativity teaching
in electronics engineering courses often seems to follow this model.
I do agree in principle at least that it is better to listen to someone
of the stature of Prof Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Chair of
the Royal Society who is an excellent communicator of modern science
than any of the nutters and netkooks listed below.
than self-appointed "experts" who proclaim that there is a BIG
CONSPIRACY to hide the fact that dinosaurs walked the Earth along with
men, that flying saucers are visiting us each day, and so on and so
forth.
Do you truly feel that I am giving unsound advice in so recommending?
I know I have no hesitation in choosing Newton, Einstein, and Darwin
over Gerard Kelleher, Brad Guth, and Ed Conrad.
Of course not. The last 3 netloons are all in my kill file although
EdConman keeps morphing to evade it. Oriel36 only got through yesterday
because I was testing an unfiltered newserver - his babble is
predictable and easily simulated by a Shannon entropy based algorithm.
But you are on shakier ground with the electronics engineer Ivor Catt
(MA Cantab) who had some very strange ideas about electricity and
relativity and ranted about them incessantly in the pages of the UK
electronics magazine Wireless World (aided and abetted by the then
editor who also had a bee in his bonnet about relativity).
Wiki has a bit on him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Catt
Some of his ideas on wafer scale integration were excellent.
Of course, having passed first-year calculus and the like makes it
possible for me to see that, no, I have not been brainwashed, but have
in my hands truth I can understand, verify, and work with. If
scientific orthodoxy were nothing more than faith in the most
impressive and conventional authorities, there would be nothing to
choose between the orthodox and the rebels.
You have to keep that distinction clear. And it gets more than a bit
hazy in areas of bleeding edge research in string theory and cosmology.
It is precisely the ability to confirm science by experiment that
distinguishes truth from dogma, the expert from the charlatan, and
progress from ignorance.
I don't approve of the way you want to claim truth vs dogma. Formal
proof of correctness is only possible in mathematics not in science.
Science by its very nature gives us a working description that matches
reality - it might or might not be correct, but as yet noone has found
an experiment that falsifies it. The opposite of ignorance is knowledge.
Regards,
Martin Brown