Sunday, October 30, 2011

Philosophy Wire: Particles, Light and the self-censorship of “current theory”…

_infog976Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-10-30]: Scientists who announced that sub-atomic particles might be able to travel faster than light (see Opera experiment) are to rerun their experiment in a different way, in order to verify the findings [source: BBC News]. Other scientists claimed that some kind of systematic error must exist in the experiment and the new trials will try to answer those claims. Verifying experimental results is good. However one must be aware of the other side of the coin: holding your self attached to the current established theory, makes you too reluctant to any new experimental result that could refute that theory. And this could be a good thing again (asking for objective data is the foundation of exact science after all – at least for the things that are in the scope of exact science see Religion and Science unification - Towards religional science), if that happened in a non dogmatic way. However calling any experiment that threatens your theory as “wrong” is near that thin line where dogmatism lies. And scientists should be very careful when treading near that line…

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