{"id":3520,"date":"2011-11-04T11:33:25","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T11:33:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=3520"},"modified":"2011-11-04T11:33:25","modified_gmt":"2011-11-04T11:33:25","slug":"the-sociology-of-cosmology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/the-sociology-of-cosmology\/","title":{"rendered":"The sociology of cosmology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Physicist Per Bak:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I once raised this issue among a group of cosmologists at a high table dinner at the Churchill College at Cambridge. &#8220;Why is that you guys are so conservative in your views, in the face of the almost complete lack of understanding of what is going on in your field?&#8221; I asked. The answer was as simple as it was surprising. &#8220;If we don&#8217;t accept some common picture of the universe, however unsupported by facts, there would be nothing to bind us together as a scientific community. Since it is unlikely that any picture that we use will be falsified in our lifetime, one theory is as good as any other.&#8221; The explanation was social, not scientific.&#8221; (Bak, page 86)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Reference:<\/em><br \/>\nPer Bak [1999]: <em>How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality<\/em>. (New York, USA: Copernicus)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Physicist Per Bak: &#8220;I once raised this issue among a group of cosmologists at a high table dinner at the Churchill College at Cambridge. &#8220;Why is that you guys are so conservative in your views, in the face of the almost complete lack of understanding of what is going on in your field?&#8221; I asked. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","p1","y2011","m11","d04","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}