> a lot of spectacularly good scientific theories looked completely daft to the mainstream at the time they were first suggested (continental drift being a great example).
Academic "conservatism" hasn't prevented them from taking over the field as collected evidence made their correctness (compared to the old model) overwhelming, so that does not seem to be much of an argument against the existing system.
Of course, change does happen but slowly in a lot of cases - as Max Planck famously said:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
A quotation by a great scientist is not evidence or proof of your hypothesis.
Ha, nice; sometimes it seems as if any concept I internally stumble upon(albeit only tangentially related in this case) has already been thoroughly fleshed out and eloquently described by a more intelligent mind than my own. You are glorious Wikipedia.
Thanks for the link/info.
Of course, you have to be careful, as Carl Sagan said:
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Re:Can the Nervous System be Hacked?
by PhasmaFelis on Monday May 26, 2014 @07:32PM
(#7802146)
And for that matter they were right to laugh at Columbus, whose estimate of the distance from Europe to China were ludicrously wrong. He would certainly have starved to death less than halfway to his destination if he hadn't had the enormous luck to run into a unknown continent on the way (which he was too stupid to realize wasn't China).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Kuhnian_paradigm...