An Open Letter to Closed Minds

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=zj49j0u7


"You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature." – Paul C. Lauterbur, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine, whose seminal paper on magnetic resonance imaging was originally rejected by Nature.

That scathing commentator on errant human behavior, John Ralston Saul, has compared the scientific community to the medieval church. Some of the signatories to the open letter would agree with him. We humans, at least the males it seems, have a penchant for setting up organizations – political, religious, and scientific – that with time become authoritarian, exclusive and dogmatic. Despite this we are led to believe that scientists are somehow trained to be above such human failings. The deception only succeeds because there is no effective investigative reporting of science.

A challenge to orthodoxy tends to be ignored at first. But if it gains popular support, the first move is to discredit and silence the challenger. The protectors of the scientific faith often parade the “scientific method” like a holy icon to warn off evil, heretical spirits. And the demand is made that “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” However, as Robert Matthews in the New Scientist of 13 March 2004 notes: “Over the years, sociologists and historians have often pointed out the glaring disparity between how science is supposed to work and what really happens. While scientists routinely dismiss these qualms as anecdotal, subjective or plain incomprehensible, the suspicion that there is something wrong with the scientific process itself is well founded. The proof comes from a rigorous mathematical analysis of how evidence alters our belief in a scientific theory.”

“Belief” is the crux of the matter. The usual declaration that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence is merely a smokescreen for the fact that no amount of evidence will change the consensus view until a sufficient number “convert” to a belief in the new theory. Science is therefore a political numbers game based on subjective beliefs. Max Planck was right when he said, “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.”

because some minds are so open they accept utter nonsense as evidence/truth

there is this.

Now two new reports stand out in relation to Alfvén’s predictions so that ultimately he cannot be ignored. The first concerns the birth of stars and the second the electric circuit of the Sun.

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=4eefp0kj
Electric Star Birth

>> The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory (formerly called Far Infrared and Sub-millimetre Telescope or FIRST) has the largest single mirror, at 3.5-metres in diameter, ever built for a space telescope. It is an infrared telescope, named after Sir William Herschel, the discoverer of the infrared spectrum. The telescope has been giving astronomers an unprecedented look inside the cosmic womb of stars, known as molecular clouds, to find (surprise, surprise) that stars are formed in “an incredible network of filamentary structures, and features indicating a chain of near-simultaneous star-formation events, glittering like strings of pearls deep in our Galaxy.” Although described as “incredible” by astronomers, this description precisely matches the decades-old expectations of plasma cosmologists.