Time Magazine: Science on the Fringe.

[LostAngeles]

Yes. I get Time. It's only because I'd wanted an article from an old issue, it was 1AM, the paper was due in ten hours, and I needed to hock up a few bucks and get a subscription to get access. The article turned out to be useless.

So, yeah. I get Time. It sucks more than I remember it did, but at this point, I'm thinking, "Well, you're not Newsweek... Still sucky and fluffy but not Newsweek."

I give it a polite flip through before I add it to the stack of magazines that clutter our apartment and yesterday, I noticed this article:

Science on the Fringe

...
But what also shows up is a surprising attitude of skepticism. "We get plenty of nonsense," admits Charles Tolbert, an astronomer at the University of Virginia and the S.S.E.'s president. "Sometimes you know just five minutes into a talk that it's absurd. But you also hear things that make you think." Like Tolbert, many of the scientists here are on the faculty at major universities, and were doing fine at conventional research. But sometimes that gets boring. "I was plodding along, adding a little to a large body of knowledge," says Garret Moddel, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado. "Doing experiments on parapsychology is a lot more interesting and potentially much more important."

At the back of their minds, those researchers always remember that the scientific establishment has a long history of scoffing at big, implausible ideas that ultimately turned out to be correct: the assertion that the Earth orbits the sun, the idea that brain-wasting diseases are caused by misshapen proteins, the proposition that hand washing can prevent doctors from transmitting disease, the claim that continents can drift across the surface of the world--all these and more were scorned at first.

While S.S.E. members know that scorn doesn't prove that a controversial idea is right (people laughed at Darwin, after all, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown), it doesn't prove an idea is wrong, either. "What we do," says Nelson, "is give everyone a respectful hearing. If we think a speaker is doing bad science, we consider it our duty to criticize it. We get our share of lunatics, but they don't hang around long."

...

I'd quote all of what Time has posted because it gives that a better perspective but I don't want to break rule 4. On the other hand, I'm also certain it's not the whole article.

Which I had totally intended to bring with me today but I was more concerned with where the hell my new National Geographic was so I could do more school work.

Anyway, my point is from what I remember of skimming the article and this, it looks like Time is trying to give this S.S.E. a bit more credibility than it deserves. On the other hand, I could be having a knee-jerk.

 

[thaiboxerken]

Whether or not Time's intent was to give SSE credibility, in the mind's of believers, it probably will regardless of motive.

 

[LostAngeles]

Whether or not Time's intent was to give SSE credibility, in the mind's of believers, it probably will regardless of motive.

Well yes, but I can hold up a rabbit and it will give woo-thing-X credibility in the minds of believers. It's the fence-sitters I worry about.

 

[thaiboxerken]

Well, those fence-sitters that are teetering on the edge of belief might very well have been tipped fully into woo-woo land from this article.