On Thursday, September 25, 2014 2:09:57 PM UTC-4, Robert L. Oldershaw wrote:
On Thursday, September 25, 2014 3:41:25 AM UTC-4, Craig Markwardt wrote:
[Mod. note: reformatted. Note that the conclusion of that article is
'science can get it wrong at times but is always self-correcting' --
pretty much what all practising scientists here would say -- mjh]
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Then "all practicing scientists here" should remember that without
mavericks like Galileo, Faraday, Einstein, Mandelbrot, Feigenbaum,
etc. the physics community would have spun its wheels indefinitely by
adding epicycles to the old paradigm, rather than questioning
assumptions, identifying the underlying problem and showing the path
to a new paradigm that offered a better, more unified, understanding
of nature.

The new book on Faraday/Maxwell/EM is an archetypal case in point.
Virtually everyone thought that Faraday was wrong-headed (and/or a
quack) because his ideas conflicted with the dominant Newtonian
paradigm. The book documents this quite clearly. Maxwell was almost
alone in treating Faraday's ideas about a "field" theory for EM
seriously.

On the other side of the equation, after 44 years of string theory
pseudo-science and its failure to deliver anything useful for physics,
Witten this week doubles down on his faith that it will lead somewhere
('maybe in 200 years'?).

"Always self-correcting"? Not by the leaders of the community, nor by
the obedient majority of its members. Kuhn's "normal science" is
notoriously bad at correcting the most fundamental errors in the
foundational assumptions.

RLO
fractal Cosmology