String theory amazes me. Nearly two decades after it was thoroughly dismissed by the scientific community, its proponents are effectively waging a PR war to convince the general public of its validitiy -- successfully! Imagine if those powers were used for good...
What's so bad about it (PR campaign)? What's behind it? A desire for money (fed'l funded programs)? Are you saying there's a cabal of physicists out for control? Of what, exactly? And how different is ths from just about anything? Is GOOD possible? Is good necessary? Are you on the side of good and right? Do you see it as sides? (I'm only being partially facetious about all/any of this. I wanna KNOW...and apologize if'n my qx are too...something...personal/naive/whatEVER.)
I probably should have included a smiley after that last sentence. :)
I was actually just marvelling at the success of their outreach effort. Science is supposed to work on the principal of peer review arriving at informed consensus, so their attempts to keep dialogue going after consensus has turned against them are certainly within their prerogative. I'm just amazed that we struggle to get the Los Angeles Times to realize the Spitzer Space Telescope exists, and can't seem to get anyone to notice the amazing science we do every day, and yet a small group of scientists can get articles like this run in major outlets on a very consistent basis. To me "first time we've directly detected light from an extrasolar planet" is much easier to understand than "the Universe is constructed of multi-dimensional one-dimensional strings which could account for the quantum fluctuations we observe in hyper-dense regions of spacetime" and yet the latter seems to be more interesting to most editors (and, assumedly, readers). I want to know how they do it (though I'm sure the lack of government backing helps them a lot).
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-10-21 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-21 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-21 08:52 pm (UTC)I was actually just marvelling at the success of their outreach effort. Science is supposed to work on the principal of peer review arriving at informed consensus, so their attempts to keep dialogue going after consensus has turned against them are certainly within their prerogative. I'm just amazed that we struggle to get the Los Angeles Times to realize the Spitzer Space Telescope exists, and can't seem to get anyone to notice the amazing science we do every day, and yet a small group of scientists can get articles like this run in major outlets on a very consistent basis. To me "first time we've directly detected light from an extrasolar planet" is much easier to understand than "the Universe is constructed of multi-dimensional one-dimensional strings which could account for the quantum fluctuations we observe in hyper-dense regions of spacetime" and yet the latter seems to be more interesting to most editors (and, assumedly, readers). I want to know how they do it (though I'm sure the lack of government backing helps them a lot).