Sheldon: … ironically, most of Sabine’s blogs are about the poor predictive power in particle theory, but in this blog she feels she has to reverse herself to defend the good name of global warming. My advice to her is to stick with what she has first-hand knowledge of, because 2nd-hand knowledge always suffers from authoritarian bias.
Tag: Imre Lakatos
Science philosopher Imre Lakatos (1922-1974) on how science fails
In other words, on this view, string theory and Darwinism could be said to be waiting for that giant breakthrough that overwhelms all the preceding nonsense. In that case, it all comes down to who they can get to wait with them. Are they important people or not? And can they successfully suppress alternatives?
Rob Sheldon on why string theory’s inflationary cosmos is a degenerate research program
Sheldon: The inflationary proposal has always been ad hoc. That is, a huge, faster-than-light expansion of the universe was proposed as a solution to the “flatness” problem, where the universe expands at a rate just sufficient to counter the gravitational attraction, where “just sufficient” means one part in 10^60 power. The inflationary model was invented to solve this fine-tuning problem.
Re Jeffrey Epstein: Let’s not complicate the issues
Epstein wasn’t even a scientist. It wasn’t like trying to figure out how to deal with a Nazi who has a cure for cancer. Don’t let the people who are implicated invoke high and difficult questions to cloud over plain old wrongdoing.