Re: "Horganism"???? Perfect!!

[Richard Tarara <rtarara@SAINTMARYS.EDU>]

I fear Bill has been watching too many Hollywood 'conspiracy' movies (like
every other movie released).  He seems obsessed with Cold Fusion and sees a
suppression of 'truth' here.  B*******t, I say.  Others have given an
adequate outline of the scientific community's reaction to this work which
has been altogether proper.  To me, the overriding reason that CF is NOT
getting a raw deal is the fact that it would have ENORMOUS economic
potential should it work.  To suggest suppression, is to fall for the 'CHAIN
REACTION' script--deliberate suppression to protect certain economic
interests--in the case of the movie it was so that one company could make
all the profit rather than releasing the scientific info to the world.
Fundamentally, suppression of CF science would help no one other than the
current Utility companies, and then only for the short-term.

This thread has moved away from the original comments that spawned
it--namely reasons for leaving the Physics field due to a lack of 'exciting'
ideas and areas in which to work.  THIS is a real problem and one that IS
connected to the state of current knowledge.

IF we hold to our 'religious' belief that nature DOES have a consistent and
unchanging set of rules, and we keep working at it, then we should approach
a 'complete' understanding of those rules asymptotically.  We understand the
limits on the word 'complete' but what we don't know is where on the curve
we presently are.  At times, many may believe we are past the 90% mark but
we may well be back at the 25% or even 10% mark.  IMO, it is unlikely we are
that low, but we are probably not at the 90% mark either.  However, it may
well be, that in some areas, some lines of study, we are in the near zero
slope region.  There IS real danger in these fields of falling into a
'stamp-collecting mode'.  My graduate and post-doctoral work was in
low-energy nuclear physics using electrostatic accelerators and magnetic
spectrographs.  We measured nuclear Q-values, energy levels, and angular
momentum (actually angular distributions to calculate angular momentum).  My
thesis was the study of a number of isotopes of Ytterbium.  All this is
classic 'stamp collecting'.  Today, only a handful of labs still exist to do
this kind of work.  Occasionally someone came up with 'new' experiments to
do--study of some reactions involved in solar neutrino production--but for
the most part, this area of research has almost played itself out and
therefore is not very exciting.  At some point the high-energy types will
run out of new things to do UNTIL they can get a bigger and better
accelerator.  If they don't get one (lost the last) then that area will get
dull and stagnant.  The theories will be there but the experiments won't be
done.

Now obviously there are other areas that have plenty of room to blossom,
others we haven't even thought of yet, and a vast open playing field call
APPLIED PHYSICS where I suspect the original 'drop-out' might have been
happy.  However, one must also accept that once the basic structure of
matter has been nailed down and once the fundamental questions of cosmology
have been answered and checked, and (add in your favorite fundamental area
of physics here) is understood to a high degree, and once all these areas of
knowledge have remained unchanged (despite continuous work) for a few
centuries, then research and theoretical physics will be a fairly
'unexciting' field of study.  Sure there will be plenty of stamps left to
collect and plenty of mundane but practical problems to work on, but the
_really big stuff_ will have been answered.

Of course, at that point the Vulcans land and we discover that their science
is far advanced AND much different than ours.  ;-)

Rick

*******************************************************
Richard W. Tarara
Department of Chemistry & Physics
Notre Dame, IN 46556
219-284-4664
rtarara@saintmarys.edu

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> On Tue, 14 Sep 1999, Hugh Haskell wrote:
>
> > Bill, I think you are making too much of the supposed epidemic of
> > "Horganism." Of course there are scientists afflicted with it,
> > including some very good ones, but they are a minority. And of course
> > Horgan may be right, although I seriously doubt it. But even Feynman
> > entertained the possibility.
>
> I'll give everyone a big target:  I claim that Horganism is extremely
> widespread and extremely powerful, but its victims cannot see it.  If
> everyone around us has the same problem, then "that's the way tings spozed
> to be," and only an outsider (such as a crackpot?) can have some
> perspective, and see the true situation.  Insiders then dismiss the
> outsiders as being deluded, on the grounds that only insiders can see the
> true situation.  In fighting people about Kuhn in the past, the anti-Kuhn
> people (there are many) stay that Kuhn is wrong because he is no real
> scientist, and only a practicing scientist can see the true situation.
> The exact opposite seems to be the case.