On Scientific Arrogance

It is not a new thing.

There’s a reason I prefer Alan Kaye’s publications over Edgar Dijkstra’s, f.i.

I think it has to do with pragmatism versus arrogance.

When I was in my teens I read about relativity theory.
For fun.
And because I wanted to be the smartest kid on the block.
In those days, it wasn’t exactly common knowledge, and I did have a lot of fun hassling my science teachers with questions they couldn’t answer.

Recently, I’ve noticed, relativity is far more widely understood, and most people coming out of university have a much better grasp of it than I do.

After reading all that, I took some things as axioms :
– nothing travels faster than the speed of light.
– there is no such thing as action at a distance.
– nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole’s gravitational field.
– the conservation laws (notably the second law of thermodynamics, and conservation of baryon number)
– etc…

Most of these things have been proven wrong by observation in recent years.

So theories were adapted, or thrown out completely, as they should be.
Although the latter option does happen less and less.

The one thing that annoys me up to a point of boiling anger, is that some ‘scientists’ seem reluctant to accept an alternative view and even ridicule it, until a ‘peer’ higher up on the pecking order tells them that’s it’s actually a viable idea.

Just visit some of the physics forums for some ‘discussions’ that make some of the net storms in the software blogosphere seem like a friendly exchange of ideas.

The holographic universe theory (and even more so the holographic mind theory) was regarded as fringe theory for a while until some respected scientists got behind it.

Just to make things clear, I have serious apprehensions to above mentioned hypothesis’s (see my previous post), but I would never have to arrogance to debunk it, because I realize I’m not qualified to do so.

Yet, people who have studied longer than I have and should understand the math, seem to have no problem in doing so (debunking it I mean) on just first glance.
And they often employ the same unscientific methods that they accuse the other party of using.

Being just an interested laymen, I’m looking for an objective, scientific approach to the theories/models I’m interested in, and this is really hard to find.

Engelbarts dream seems further off than ever.

And here’s one thing that _really_ ticks me off.

The Crackpot Index, by John C Baez.

The next phrase should be read whilst imagining mr brando in ‘Apocalypse Now’.

‘The Arrogance, The Arrogance, …’.