The game stays the same

I once read the book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. What surprised me was the fact that a great deal of "scientists" in the past were self-serving, arrogant, cocky, self-important, conceited, overweening, priggish pricks. A property by the way they share with today's politicians, religious believers and the rest of the human race.

Sometime ago I thought that life today is different, that people today are somehow "better". Today I am more disillusioned and it does not surprise me anymore that politics interfered with science and that there were, are (and always will be) "scientists" who are willing supporters of this kind of endeavour.

I would like to call myself an misanthrope, as I hate those kinds of people, but there are people in world who are not pricks. So does hating just stupid pricks make me a misanthrope?

(via fefe, in German)

[Update] I found this nice nugget via wikipedia:

Bryson also exaggerates the portrayals of some scientists: Ernest Rutherford is said to be an overpowering force, Fred Hoyle a complete weirdo, Fritz Zwicky an utterly abrasive astronomer, and Newton a total paranoiac. Surely the descriptions of these and other scientists are distorted.

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Prepared by the staff of Jupiter Scientific

Which sounds to me like: "I'm just too lazy to look up any facts, but surely these descriptions are distorted. Impossible that scientists are anything other than scientists, same as it is impossible that a politician is anything other than a politician or an astronaut is anything other than an astronaut."

Sure, Bryson could be wrong. But his works looks pretty solid to me.

Scientists do that?

Pseudoskepticism? I am shocked!

I found this after reading this:

Cold Fusion is a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment. Between Cold Fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. Cold fusion papers are almost never published in refereed scientific journals, with the result that those works don't receive the normal critical scrutiny that science requires. On the other hand, because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here.

Still, this wikipedia article claims that (just in case you have missed it reading your local science magazine):

The search of the products of nuclear fusion has resulted in conflicting evidences, leading two thirds of the DOE reviewers to exclude the possibility of nuclear reactions in these experiments in 2004. One additional reason for many to exclude a nuclear origin for the effect is that current physics theory cannot explain how fusion could occur in these experiments, and how the energy generated could be converted into heat (as opposed to radiation or other nuclear products). Still, in 2006, Mosier-Boss and Szpak, researchers in the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego, reported unambiguous evidences of nuclear reactions, and a project has been set-up to facilitate its independent replication.

I really like the "still" in the last sentence. "Everybody knows it is bullshit, and even if it is real, these pariahs have no clue at all what it is, and still they go ahead, waste money on experiments, that seem to claim we are wrong. Unblievable."

One has to love the scientific community.

And I like the agnostic position of the US Patent Office, accepting a patent on cold fusion in 2001. Not that I like the patent system, and accepting a patent on something highly dicredited in the scientific community shows a part of the problems, but this agnostic approach has its charme.