Rosanne's Lounge

5 Responses to “Busted”

• lederhosen Says:
  February 9th, 2006 at 11:05 pm

  One of the stupider aspects of this is that in scientific parlance, ‘theory’ doesn’t even mean what Deutsch thought it meant. It’s a very respectable term that’s often used for generally-accepted fact – gravitation and relativity are both ‘theories’, for instance, though no serious scientist doubts them.

  But creationists like to muddy the waters – taking the ‘theory’ in ‘theory of evolution’ to imply a controversy that isn’t there – and Deutsch no doubt learned his science from that quarter.
• admin Says:
  February 9th, 2006 at 11:29 pm

  I know! I can just imagine the NASA Web guys adding ‘theory’ after ‘Big Bang’ and saying, in a Princess Bride voice of course, because they’d be über-geeks, ‘okayyy, but I don’t think this word means what you think it means!’

  At the same time, I think it *is* important to state that things are just theories sometimes. When we’re now having discussions about whether dark matter really exists because one guy has a new theory that accounts for gravitational shift without it but can’t account for the afterglow of the Big Bang while another guy announces he’s got specific scientific measurements about its weight and temperature for the first time, you can understand how students would get confused.

  I still remember having an intense discussion in my loungeroom when I was about 22 with my best friend at the time who was studying History and Philosophy of Science. I ended up in tears when I had to concede my nice safe world of ‘known truths’ was tremulous and contingent.
• lederhosen Says:
  February 10th, 2006 at 12:01 am

  you can understand how students would get confused

  I suspect where things like dark matter is concerned, the world’s split into people who are confused because they haven’t looked into it, and people who are still confused because they have (Me, I’m in the former category – astrophysics looks like a fascinating field, but I ended up spending time on other things.)

  The thing that really changed my world-view was Godel’s Theorem; I think anybody who goes into the sciences starts with a little spark of “with enough logic, anything is possible”, and GT shows that that’s not true – that some questions can never be answered by logic. I think that’s strangely wonderful; a friend of mine views it as a sort of personal affront.
• anthonybaxter Says:
  February 10th, 2006 at 3:36 am

  Course, now he’s whining that he’s being persecuted (of course):

  In the interview, Mr. Deutsch said that Dr. Hansen had partisan ties “all the way up to the top of the Democratic Party,” and that he was “using those ties and using his media connections to push an agenda, a worst-case-scenario agenda of global warming.” He said that anyone who disagrees with Dr. Hansen “is labeled a censor and is demonized and vilified in the media — and the media of course is a willing accomplice here.”

  Mr. Deutsch contended that although Dr. Hansen was a scientist, he wanted to talk about policy as well as science. “He wants to demean the president, he wants to demean the administration and create a false perception that the administration is watering down science and lying to the public,” Mr. Deutsch said. “And that is patently false.”
• damien_wise Says:
  February 10th, 2006 at 11:53 am

  I think the new line he’s justly earned for his CV is far more damaging then having a fake, old line removed. :->
  [I wonder what a karmic bitch-slapping sounds like?]

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