I am an accredited scientist. I have a degree from an accredited university in chemistry with a minor in mathematics and physics. I have been doing analytical and research work for my entire career. And I'm damned good at my job. (Dave E. Coyote, Genius.)
I also get riled up when the media or the government does something based on "science," or that is "scientifically proven" and it's actually nothing of the sort. I'm actually kinda touchy on the subject.
And I found
NOTHING inflammatory about Aramis' original statement. Ignorant of the actual meaning of the word in a narrow scientific method context, perhaps, but not an attack on science.
And that's because science must stand on its own, irregardless of attack or not_attack. The term "QED" (thus it is proved) applies to science as in no other field because if you can't prove it to the thousands of expert skeptics, it isn't a scientific finding.
These days, especially, in the post-cold-fusion era (and the university I work for, Texas A&M, was part of that fiasco; not my department, fortunately
), the scientist has to not only create a reproducible result, it must be multiply confirmed by other scientists before it's accepted into the general scientific community as a proven hypothesis a.k.a. theory.
My program, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, is in the forefront of geological research. We are literally discovering things that have never been seen before by living human beings, and that creates a ton of theories - scratch that, hypotheses - which turn out to be bad assumptions. A simple example is the relationship to seismic sounding data to what's actually in the formation. In one of our recent cruises to the mid-Atlantic, we drilled into a formation called the Atlantis Massif (IODP Expedition 304/305) with the hope that we would drill into unaltered mantle material.
The seismics showed a promising velocity change at a certain depth, and the proponents put forth the idea - the hypothesis - that this was where we'd get into the unaltered gabbros and peridiotites. Testing that hypothesis by actually drilling into the region of the reflector, we discovered that no, it wasn't what was assumed, and that a combination of complex (chaotic) factors led to that reflector. Doing downhole seismic shots (what we call a vertical seismic profile) and comparing that to the hard rock core recovered, we discovered a very different situation from that which was proposed.
And that's how it is with science. The proponents had a ton of data that supported their hypothesis. It seemed sound (although there were others who interpreted the same data differently). It was assumed true for operational drilling considerations (that's a factor of the proponents convincing our governing science panels of the worth of their proposal; i.e., politics). And it was disproved by actual drilling and core analysis.
And now they have new hypotheses which will need to be proven or disproven by further analytical work on what we recovered as well as future deep sea drilling expeditions.
Back to Aramis' comment. It was obviously a comment from a non-scientist and in jest. That's all. No deep attack on science.
