Privileged Planet: New study (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, April 26, 2012, 14:12 (4595 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Svensmark's magnum opus is published. Supernova seem to control the speed of evolution. Too bad he didn't go back further. It might explain the Cambrian.-http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/24/svensmarks-cosmic-jackpot-evidence-of-nearby-supe...-Last week it was 11-year solar cycles, and this week it's supernovae. For all we know, everybody is right. Or wrong. The following took my eye, as it illustrates all the problems we have been discussing under "How Reliable is Science?" and its triumphant conclusion might almost have been written by our very own Matt:-"A mark of a good hypothesis is that it looks better and better as time passes. With the triumph of plate tectonics, diehard opponents were left redfaced and blustering. In 1960 you'd not get a job in an American geology department if you believed in continental drift, but by 1970 you'd not get the job if you didn't. That's what a paradigm shift means in practice and it will happen sometime soon with cosmic rays in climate physics.-Plate tectonics was never much of a political issue, except in the Communist bloc. There, the immobility of continents was doctrinally imposed by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. An analogous diehard doctrine in climate physics went global two decades ago, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was conceived to insist that natural causes of climate change are minor compared with human impacts.-Don't fret about the diehards. The glory of empirical science is this: no matter how many years, decades, or sometimes centuries it may take, in the end the story will come out right."-
Just one tiny problem here. Who can tell us for sure that it's "the end", and that the story has "come out right"?