Footnote Physicist

          “Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science, because distracting confrontations with reality           —where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison—are more readily avoided.  The           standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed.”           – Carl Sagan I PSEUDO-SCIENCE           Pseudo-science has the appearance of science, especially to the layperson, but none of the substance.  Precisely because the sciences have had so much success at explaining the cosmos, its philosophical competitors, and mere hucksters and salesman, have attempted to insert a patina of scientific language into their claims in the hopes that a patina of its convincing power will rub off.   Pseudo-science comes in three distinct flavors: the continued belief in a hypothesis, pos...

          “In the demon haunted world world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that           stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”           – Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan I           It is fashionable to claim that one cannot place limits on scientific inquiry and that anyone who tries is doomed to fail—that the scientific project is irreducibly stumbled-upon, with no hard-and-fast laws that must be abided. II   This is nonsense; of course the epistemology of science is a normative theory!   It is true that our knowledge of epistemology evolves over time. III   It is also true that this means that even epistemological knowledge is provisional (though I contend that it is necessarily much firmer than the bodies of knowledge it supports).  But both of those arguments are true of our knowledge of any topic; t...

          “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”           – Attributed to Ayn Rand I           “I do not mean that philosophers were ordinarily present in universities any more than prophets or           saints are ordinarily present in houses of worship.  But because those houses of worship are           dedicated to the spirit of the prophets and saints, they are different from other houses.  They can           undertake many functions not central to that spirit, but they remain what they are because of what           they look up to, and everything they do is informed by that reverence.  But if the faith disappears,           if the experiences reported by the prophets and saints ...