| Chronology | Current Month | Current Thread | Current Date |
| [Year List] [Month List (current year)] | [Date Index] [Thread Index] | [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] | [Date Prev] [Date Next] |
Bill, I think you are making too much of the supposed epidemic of
"Horganism." Of course there are scientists afflicted with it,
including some very good ones, but they are a minority. And of course
Horgan may be right, although I seriously doubt it. But even Feynman
entertained the possibility.
The reason the Kuhnian analysis rings true is not because of an
innate Horganism among scientists, but a well reasoned conservatism,
coupled with a small amount of not wanting to be made too
uncomfortable by new things (In this light, "Night Thoughts of a
Classical Physicist" is really relevant). This means that most of us
will remain skeptical of radical new ideas (or even radical old ones)
until a solid basis of evidence and a credible and coherent theory
are available in support of the new idea.
And if the idea flies too
much in the face of the accepted theories, then it may be some time
before it gets accepted if it happens to be valid.
Of course most of
the time these ideas prove not to be valid, and the conservatism was
well-founded. I submit that the story of the Gravitational fifth
force from around 1985 (I think) is a good case in point of a radical
new idea that didn't pan out but was handled exactly correctly by all
concerned.
As a result of everyone doing things correctly, when it
was over, the original proponents could announce that their
suggestion was wrong, and everyone happily went back to whatever they
were doing before the storm broke. Nobody's career or reputation was
ruined, and there were no recriminations or derisive laughter when
the idea died. I think this is a textbook example of how science
should be done. Compare it to the cold fusion fiasco.
So I argue that new ideas aren't as actively resisted as you claim.
In a mature science like physics, new phenomena frequently occur near
the signal to noise limit, which often makes them difficult to
distinguish from cases of pathological science, which invariably
occur near that limit (a good example: N-rays). But if the findings
fit in with what is possible in accordance with current
understanding, the new ideas are quickly accepted and incorporated
into the general body of knowledge.
It's when they don't fit that the
gears start to grind. What happens next is usually complex, depending
on the stature of the proponents of both sides, the difficulty of the
experiments, the general tenor of the times, and many other reasons,
most of them psychological rather than scientific. Horganism
certainly plays a role here. But when the old paradigm has gotten too
creaky and everyone realizes it, a new idea is often quickly accepted
even if it is radical (sorry, at this late hour, I can't think of a
good example offhand, but there are such, and I'm sure others on this
list can provide several).
For what it's worth, I always enjoy the comment of Maxwell regarding
the nature of light, quoted, I believe, by William Kingdon Clifford:
(not necessarily word-for-word, I'm reproducing it from memory) "We
used to believe in the corpuscular theory of light, but now we
believe in the wave theory. Not because the evidence for waves was so
compelling, but because all the proponents of the corpuscular theory
have died."
Of course, we've come full circle now on this topic.
Although on the surface it seems to support your thesis, at a deeper
level I think it supports what I am trying to say.