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<p>Really? I wasn’t trying to be glib – that would be real news to me. One might have predicted that after all the talk about “the scientific method” in high school, MIT and other science schools might have a whole class about what this is, but I barely heard the words. Do you think that the professors who did talk about these things were sensitive to the flaws in definitions of science based on things like falsifiability, or did they have the impression that these issues were all nicely worked out?</p>
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<p>I think you DO know about this industry but don’t have enough respect for it. The fact that they are funded by an interest group to which you have objections does not entail that they are unskilled or that the arguments they make are always wrong. The great danger is that the scientific community will get glib about the ways it defends it work and its authority. Don’t you agree that no matter how misguided these people are, science shouldn’t be defended with overly simplistic theories of science?</p>
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Would your objection be withdrawn if they took out that word and admitted that planning ability is beyond their ability to diagnose at this point? </p>
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<p>Whence arises your conviction that work aimed at disproving a reigning scientific theory without a comprehensive alternative hypothesis is not scientific? If a group sets up a huge array of telescopes to test whether a certain phenomenon predicted by quantum gravity theory occurs, and they find that, though the instruments are sensitive enough to detect it if it did occur, the phenomenon is not observed, are they not doing science? Is their project merely a challenge to quantum gravity and hence to be dismissed (and not taught in science classes if it finds only negative results)? What is the theory of science that justifies this view? It would certainly be new to me.</p>