Via Stranger Fruit:
Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again until only a fool would refuse to believe them.
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Like PZ, I too received a copy of What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty [amaz] a few weeks back. Also like PZ, I was taken with Ian McEwan's entry (see PZ's post for that). I also liked this comment from Seth Lloyd:
Unlike mathematical…
This is no big surprise, although I did not expect the magnitude of the
effect:
href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/bsj-vaw080806.php">Violence
at work significantly boosts clinical depression risk
Work-related violence and threats and the risk of
depression and stress…
As it happens, I've been thinking about mathematical anti-evolutionism a lot lately.
Sometime over the summer, though I can't find the exact post, I mentioned that I had been working on an article about mathematical arguments against evolution. I finished it in the fall, and it has recently been…
#10: Wolfgang Pauli
Wolfgang Pauli was once asked to critique a paper of questionable merit. As he is said to have put it, "This is not right. It is not even wrong." It was a good and concise statement of what physics requires - not merely interesting ideas, but ones that are both grounded in…
However ... there is certainly no shortage of people willing to fill that role.
Heh...you know it. Sadly, most science is pretty intuitive (ie, "common sense"), but inaccessible for the "masses." The larger problem is the steady supply of PT Barnums waiting to exploit them.