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Quote of the Day – Theories
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. – Richard Feynman
Science is supposed to be about following the facts as revealed by experimentation. If the facts revealed something contrary to your expectations and beliefs, you went with the facts. In 1911 Ernest Rutherford conducted an experiment firing alpha particles through gold foil. It was a test of the Thompson model of atomic structure.
Rutherford expected to see some small-angle dispersions of the particles after they passed through the foil. The results were unexpected. Some particles bounced almost straight back. In Rutherford’s words, it was “as if you fired a 15-inch shell into a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” Rutherford went with the observational results, abandoning the theory behind the Thompson model and discovering the atomic nucleus.
That is not the approach commonly used today. Most science today is funded by governments. They expect experiments to produce results. If the experiment proves a negative – this theory does not work – the project will get defunded. Moreover, projects that get results desired by the government get more heavily funded. Those whose results contradict the cherished beliefs of the politician paymaster tend to lose funding or get defunded entirely.
This is not new. Based on personal experience it has been going on since at least the 1980s. I was involved in an effort to create a model of uncaptured Shuttle Orbiter accelerations. After a dozen missions it became clear that our model was an exercise in curve fitting with no predictive ability. When I pointed this out, the lead told me, “That may be true, but this is what we are being paid to study, so we will continue studying it until we get results that work.”
I was transferred off the study (at my request). It never delivered meaningful results, despite a series of predictive models that always failed on the next mission. The study team received a NASA award for excellence in research.
If anything it has gotten worse over the last 40 years. There is a flood of fake science washing through research. Two-thirds of researchers cannot reproduce results on studies done by their colleagues. Scientific journals helped China censor Covid’s origins. AI is injecting nonsense into papers depending on faked research. Scientific publisher Wiley is closing 19 research journals due to the flood of bogus research. (Sorry, the last is behind a paywall.)
The need for funding accounts for most of this. Desperate to get funding, researchers publish anything, even if faulty or faked, to publish and keep from perishing. This is simple careerism, the desire to keep your job. It is worse in fields where those funding the research desire a specific result or where ideology infects research. In those cases science has been replaced by science!®, a faith-based substitute for Feynman’s and Rutherford’s world of theory proved through experimentation.
Science!®, like all false religions, will eventually collapse under its own contradictions. It will do immeasurable damage before it does.
Published in Group Writing
Prime example: climate research
Yup.
Is this why people in Africa are not able to produce the food they need?
When revealed, this should be a death knell for any researcher and the organization allowing it.
It should be. It isn’t though as long as the researcher or organization adheres to the orthodoxies of the high priests of science!®.
This is what I am going to use the next time someone tells me we need government spending on research.
There is likely just as much of the same kind of damage done by NGO’s in socially and politically disputed areas but funded by tax dollars in ways similar to scientific research.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
Yogi Berra
You should do a quote of the day on that.
Even in the 1970’s, scientists knew that when writing grant proposals it was essential to promise that the research would solve the crisis du jour. Otherwise beltway bureaucrats would almost certainly reject the application.
I figured as much, but could not speak to it from personal experience. It is just another illustration that people respond to the rewards offered. Reward bad behavior and you get more of it. Scientists are not a disinterested priesthood. The are typical human beings, motivated by keeping their rice bowls full.
Thinking people understand all this.
However society is designed so that a lot of people never get time to think anything through. After working 40 hours a week and commuting another 15 if not more, they then want to settle down, turn on the boob tube and the Talking Heads explain to them how to view various issues.
It was no accident that just as the COVID plandemic protocols were unleashed, almost every one of the major Talking Heads promoted whatever “intel” that Tony Fauci and Bill Gates wanted to have become part of the average American’s mind set.
.Additionally all the late night “comics” – and I use that word with reservation – designed a great deal of their material around disparaging those who did not wear masks or who did not jump eagerly in line to get jabbed.
Tucker Carlson was one of the few who rocked the boat during this era of the Stepford Talking Heads. For his being true to his beliefs, he was dismissed by Fox news. It is my belief that what got him canceled from Fox was the few times he repeated that he would never go against his own beliefs, rather than one show where he said this, or another show where he said that. He declared himself to be both free and a thinker and that was just too much for those at Fox who play things safe and want to remain in our CIA’s good graces.
However he was so popular he landed on his feet. So he still remains one of the few who has a large audience and can inform that audience about those reasons why any official narrative should be questioned.
That was the consensus among the scientists I knew at that time: “This is something you need to know if you’re going to become a scientist in academia or any institution dependent on government grants.” Nowadays it’s much worse: Not only must you bend the knee to the currently fashionable eco hysterias, you must also publicly pledge allegiance to DEI and CRT and related evils.
This is in quotes but not sourced. We might not have known how bad it could get when it started but we know now. Stop it. It is government grants, science and other.
Secondary, perhaps, right after Covid science.
What else was corrupted by government money? What other forms of corruption have corrupted science, and what other fields are bogus, or what other theories are just wrong?
They also do other stuff. I’ve had some good articles on Augustine or on faith and reason published by Wiley.
Publishers probably started out thinking the research was good because government funded it. Now we all know that expected funding is the cause of bad research. Some of us don’t understand why we would continue that.
We need a way to encourage good research and discourage bad research. The problem is most systems can be gamed.
Dr Robert Malone weighed in on how tremendously corrupt the bureaucracy which allowed Tony Fauci to be the top guy really was:
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/wrongdoing-and-illegal-activity-by
I think it is supposed to be about all the known facts, not just those revealed by experimentation (a posteriori knowledge).
This theory of epistemology is explained in Economic Science and the Austrian Method by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It can be downloaded for free from Mises.org.
It is not sourced because it is my own paraphrase of what scientists were saying in my presence.
Bureaucracies tend to get taken over by politically-inclined people, while those whose passion is science stick to doing actual science. (Likewise for medicine and any other field.)
Government grants, man. I hate them like I hate hell and all Montagues.
They become an end in themselves in the eyes of university admin. We move past “Publish or perish” and into “Get a government grant or get out.”
All originates with Congress. The people can and must change that if the American Ideal is to survive.
It was that way in space, too. By the late 1980s the bureaucrats had taken over NASA and every program followed the same pattern:
You couldn’t fail if you didn’t try. The only reason Space Station got finished was because it was an international project and had to get done. (The US-only Space Station Freedom did get cancelled.) And the only reason NASA is moving ahead in space again is Elon Musk was so successful they had to do something or risk cancellation.
You say “moving ahead”. Are you sure?
I think NASA is getting ready to burn up more people on reentry or blow them up in the way to orbit.
I would not be back there if they were not. I don’t need the job. I took it because it is a cool project.
Musk has transformed space, truly taking into the operational era. While there are other private sector space companies, Space-X is head-and-shoulders above them. NASA has had to improve in order to keep from having Congress abandon them for private enterprise. Especially since they spend so much time deriding Musk. (You would not believe the antipathy towards Musk at NASA.)
NASA really isn’t in the launch and landing business anymore. They hire private companies to do that. Except maybe the Orion capsule, and they are going to be really hinky about putting humans in it until they are 99.9999 percent sure it is safe. Which may be in 2034. Or 2044. Or after Musk has mounted a lunar expedition.
I could see Boeing’s capsule failing, though. Blue Origin is also building manned systems for NASA. I have reviewed their documents. Cannot say further than that due to confidentiality agreements.
I guess you know better than me. From the outside, NASA appears utterly incompetent. They are, remember, the users of the deadliest spacecraft in history.
So, NASA cant celebrate success but have to pout about it. I look forward to Musk on Mars while NASA whines. I’d be happy to see NASA defunded.
They were just about to launch people in that, were they not?
And frankly, what is the point of NASA if not to put Men in space? America should be able to put Men in space. That is what NASA is for!
No offense, but pictures from Planet X make no difference iny life at all. America not losing control of orbit to China does.
NASA is an incompetent organization that kills astronauts in ill conceived, over expensive boondoggles. Sure they can make a billion dollar helicopter fly on Mars. So what? What does that do? People on Mars will teach us more about Mars far faster.
NASA should be about beating the other nations in Space. Instead, they bitch about, and try to use the FAA to stymie the company actually making a difference.
I’ll believe Blue Origin when they have actually done something.
So far they haven’t even managed to duplicate the success of the Mercury program.
When I was a child, NASA was this incredible adventure that was going to move the human species into space. I watched the space shuttle go up as a child and thought it was so great this was going to change everything. It didn’t.
NASA is a repository of lies and false dreams. It is the epitome of betrayal.
Actually, no. That would be the Soviets. They had man-killing flaws in their Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz, and Almaz space station. (A deadly one on Mir and Soyuz, too.) The Vostok had a flaw that almost killed the crew on the first half-dozen missions. I can understand missing it on the first mission, but they never fixed it. They did kill four Cosmonauts on two different space missions and several others on Earth in accidents analogous to the Apollo 1 fire. They were luckier than the US on their spaceflights (and it was luck), plus they concealed the non-space fatalities.
There is a book out in June I will be reviewing, The Wrong Stuff, about the Soviet space program. It will curl your hair. It did mine, and I have little enough left.
Pretty much.
That was the Boeing CCS. And they didn’t launch.
I’m going too disagree about the point of NASA being to put humans in space. It might have been back in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s it should have been (but wasn’t) to facilitate the private sector putting people into space. They stood in the way of that in order to make NASA seem superhuman.
I can’t tell you the number of people relieved that the Teacher in Space program and plans to put ordinary people into space died with Challenger. If ordinary Janes and Joes travelled in space that meant astronauts weren’t special. They shouldn’t be Greek gods and goddesses. They should be ordinary working folks, but resent the implications of that.
So far the US has successfully put three times the objects into orbit this year than China has. SpaceX alone has made double the launches China has. The US is not losing control of space to China, however much China tries to imply we are.
NASA should not be about beating other nations in space. It should be about facilitating US industry to maintain space leadership. But NASA dislikes the grubby idea of using space to make money. Making money isn’t pure. It isn’t right as they see it. (What do you expect? that’s the attitude of all government agencies and academia. Why should NASA be different?)
It is not NASA siccing the FAA on SpaceX. It is the Biden administration. NASA and the DoD need Starliner and are running interference for SpaceX. Even though NASA dislikes SpaceX.
NASA is a government bureaucracy. No more and no less. Don’t expect more from them than you would from the Veterans’ Administration or the DMV.
I’ll have to take your word for that.
That is pretty sick, frankly.
That is good to hear. In all things US vs. China, it seems China is eating our lunches. Nice to know this is not one.
It seems to me America should be intent on stopping China from doing much at all in Space. Russia too. Why should the US Government’s Space Program not be about advancing American interests?
If what you say is true, then NASA should be defunded and all Space Exploration privatized totally. Let SpaceX take over the Cape and mothball Huston Control as it was never really needed anyway.
Another reason to elect Trump.
I stopped a long time ago. That does not mean the little boy in me does not hate NASA with the strength of a 1000 suns for their lies.