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Sunday, October 9, 2011

Science Does not Include Closing off Debate...

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An opinion in the WSJ has earned derision in some quarters of the scientific community for what they claim is its claim that one experiment in one field of science can be used to question an experiment in another field.

That WSJ paragraph:
5) The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere.

It seems obvious, though, that Robert Bryce did not use the results of one experiment in one field of study to draw conclusions in an unrelated field.

What he did was to compare the treatment of the scientific method in one field of study to its treatment in another field of study based the valid presumption that the scientific method is common between all fields of study.

He notes that in one field science is presumed "settled" while in another it is still questioned.  Thus, it is clear that one field of study adheres to the scientific process while the other raises itself above question. Or said another way: Physics is science; climate science is not.

However, I prefer the conservation of words found in:

If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere.






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