NPWittList(wassomethingPynchonrelatedatsomepointmaybe)

[David Casseres]

Ted Samsel sez
>>But then, you get science cranks like Roberty McIlwhaine (remember him?)
>>and Archimedes Plutonium who take science into their own hands. Some-
>>times this stuff is amusing, but the disinformation-for-disinformation's
>>sake aspect of these antics often beclouds already murky issues with
>>"conventional wisdom" and ever-so "wishful thinking".

and Sojourner answers
>Biggest science crank of all time: Aristotle.

Not the same at all.  Aristotle did the bare-minimum requirement for 
"science": he did a huge amount of *really hard work*, putting together a 
systematic description of nature as it looked to thinking people at that 
time.  Today's pseudo-scientists and cranks do not -- they put all their 
effort into *publicizing* their descriptions.  The descriptions 
themselves are easily seen to be the product of lazy minds that are not 
concerned with accuracy, completeness, or consistency, only with 
impressing as many people as possible.

>And he was the biggest only because so many people followed his
>teachings blindly.  Aristotle is a personal enemy of mine, but
>that aside, it was blind assumption that a man, a human man,
>knew more than you that lead to such dead-end beliefs.

If subsequent generations decided Aristotle had "finished" natural 
science and they didn't need to do any work of their own, that is hardly 
Aristotle's fault.  And in general, when I think about, say, physics, I 
do believe Maxwell and Rutherford and Einstein and Feynman and Hawking 
and Wheeler and Gribbin and all those guys knew/know a lot more than I 
do, because I know they *did the work.*  If somebody shows up saying "oh, 
well, you know, that relativity is just a cockeyed theory -- here's how 
it really works," I want to see the calluses on his hands.


Cheers,
David