Freedom of Science

At Theorema Egregium nc quoted Imre Lakatos:

Scientists … do not abandon a theory merely because facts contradict it. They normally either invent some rescue hypothesis to explain what they then call a mere anomaly or, if they cannot explain the anomaly, they ignore it….

I would change “scientists” to “physicists” because this is a trick physicists, and other scholastics, have been using for ages to save their doctrines. One reason physicists do not abandon their beliefs, as Carl Brannen wrote, is because they

are unable to release their hold on what they know, so they have to find ways to glue together the incompatible things they’ve been taught.

The other reason is that since physics is an unregulated professional industry, physicists can overrule experiments by labeling them to fit their doctrines.

In physics an anomaly is anything which seems to contradict the physics canon. In the Postscript to “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” Lee Smolin gives an example of this scholastic method. Smolin refers to a speculation about cosmic rays that three Russian physicists floated in the 1960s. Later their scenario turned out to be wrong. But since their scenario had entered the physics canon it could not be wrong. Therefore, physicists renamed it “UHECR anomaly”. This is standard in physics and such examples abound.

Since professional physicists have total authority over experiments there are no crucial experiments in physics. Physicists can overrule any experiment by calling it an anomaly.

I have written about this regarding the Cavendish experiment. Physicists claim that Cavendish observed the occult Newtonian force. Occult does not exist in nature therefore Cavendish did not observe the Newtonian force. But assume that a precise duplication of the Cavendish experiment conducted by physicists themselves showed that indeed Cavendish did not measure the Newtonian force and this got somehow published in a physics organ and entered the literature.

You would think that textbooks will be rewritten. Not really. Physicists will dub this new “phenomenon” the Cavendish anomaly.

What would happen is that since now Cavendish anomaly is a legitimate field of experiment physicists will rush to duplicate Cavendish experiment by building all kinds of micro or macro oscillators (calling their gadgets Cavendish pendulums) and measure the oscillations. They would publish their measurements as verifications of the Cavendish anomaly.

By proving that Cavendish never measured the Newtonian force physicists will prove that he did. They just renamed the results of the experiment in order to own it. Once they own it they have the ancestral right to call it whatever they want and market it as a new scientific discovery in the Big Media. This can only happen in the deeply corrupt field of scholastic physics.

It would not be hard to guess that in no time string theorists, still short of a suitable experiment of their own, will claim that Cavendish Anomaly is the first measurement of the String Constant G and finally establish string theory as an experimental science.

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