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leonine -> RE: One Paper in toto is what the theory of global warming is based on (9/27/2013 8:49:48 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
Interesting article. What do you think?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2008/07/21/monckton_aps/
And the whole theory of gravitation is based on a book by some dumb Englishman three hundred years ago, so we can forget about that, too.
This is one of the many fundamental things about science that people don't get when they approach it as a branch of politics.
Theories don't happen because a bunch of eggheads get together and agree to tell the world that X is true, and shout down anyone who argues. They happen because one guy writes a paper saying he thinks X is true, and another (usually) writes one saying it isn't, and a lot of people read the papers and make up their own minds, and a lot of them do research that either re-tests the original experiments or observations or extends them, and they write papers which say, in essence, "we checked, and it turns out that yes, X is true." And this goes on for ten or twenty or thirty years, and then X is in the textbooks as a fact.
It's a process which, among other things, has produced the machines you are reading these words on, which tends to indicate that it is a workable way at arriving at the truth. But it is completely incomprehensible to corporate folks, for whom facts are whatever brings in the money, and to politicians, for whom facts are whatever the policy requires; and these people cannot understand why the scientists don't rewrite their textbooks on demand like sensible folk.
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