Scientific crackpots usually try to attack founding figures and historical experiments, as if that would cause the edifice of a science to crumble, rather than critiquing contemporary science in any coherent way. The anti-relativity people are always going on about mistakes in Einstein's arguments and flaws in the Michelson-Morley experiment, as if that would accomplish anything at this point.
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bruce munro (from livejournal.com)2013-11-25 09:38 pm (UTC)(link)
Maybe it's because they have trouble distinguishing science from religion? After all, when critiquing Christianity, people usually go to the bible first...
Maybe partly that, but also an identification of the science with what they read in introductory texts or popular expositions, which often take a quasi-historical approach.
Also, a limited understanding that science is fundamentally a social process, rather than a giant deduction that some isolated person makes from first principles.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2013-11-24 08:54 pm
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Also, a limited understanding that science is fundamentally a social process, rather than a giant deduction that some isolated person makes from first principles.