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Old November 29th 13, 08:25 PM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default SCIENCE AS IDEOLOGY (DYING SCIENCE)

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78: "Einstein's theory of relativity fails to reconcile the contradictory principles on which it is based. Rather than combining incompatible assumptions into an integrated whole, the theory allows the adept to step between incompatible assumptions in a way that hides these inconsistencies. The clock paradox is symptomatic of Einstein's failure, and its purported resolution is illustrative of the techniques that can be used to mask this failure. To uncover to the logical contradictions in the theory of relativity presents no very difficult task. However, the theory is impervious to such attacks as it is shielded by a professional constituency of supporters whose interests and authority are bound up in maintaining its inflated claims. Relativity theory, in short, is an ideology. (...) If relativity theory is an ideology, then its illusory explanatory power enhances the real power and authority of theoretical physicists. Precisely because Einstein's theory is inconsistent, its exponents can draw on contradictory principles in a way that greatly extends the apparent explanatory scope of the theory. Inconsistency may be a disadvantage in a scientific theory but it can be a decisive advantage in an ideology. The inconsistency of relativity theory - to borrow the language of the early Marx - gives relativity its apparent universal content. This seeming power of explanation functions to enhance the status of the group, giving them power over others through the enhanced control over resources, and a greater power to direct research and to exclude and marginalise dissent."

http://www.autodidactproject.org/oth...deology_2.html
Ideology of/in Contemporary Physics, Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond: "In this way, major advances in modern physics, especially in relativity and quantum mechanics, have paradoxically fed an intensely irrational current. (...) Modern physics appears as a collection of mathematical formulae, whose only justification is that 'they work'. Moreover, the 'examples' used to 'concretise' the knowledge are often totally unreal, and actually have the effect of making it even more abstract. Such is the case when the explanation of special relativity is based on the consideration of the entirely fictitious spatial and temporal behaviour of clocks and trains (today sometimes one speaks of rockets . . . it sounds better . . . but it is as stupid!). (...) A closed arduous, forbidding education, which stresses technical manipulation more than conceptual understanding, in which neither past difficulties nor future problems in the search for knowledge appear, perfectly fulfils two essential roles: to promote hierarchisation and the 'elite' spirit on behalf of a science shown as being intrinsically difficult, to be within the reach of only a few privileged individuals; and to impose a purely operational technical concept of knowledge, far from a true conceptual understanding, which would necessarily be critical and thus would reveal the limits of this knowledge."

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.6324.pdf
Non-standard Models and the Sociology of Cosmology, Martin Lopez-Corredoira: "Cosmologists do not usually work within the framework of alternative cosmologies because they feel that these are not at present as competitive as the standard model. Certainly, they are not so developed, and they are not so developed because cosmologists do not work on them. It is a vicious circle. The fact that most cosmologists do not pay them any attention and only dedicate their research time to the standard model is to a great extent due to a sociological phenomenon (the "snowball effect" or "groupthink"). We might well wonder whether cosmology, our knowledge of the Universe as a whole, is a science like other fields of physics or a predominant ideology. (....) Alternative theories die because they are being killed by the same people who say that they are dead."

Defenders of true science looking for people doing wrong science:

http://www.indiroyunu.com/images/ima...demo-indir.jpg

Pentcho Valev