Challenging a consensus
See any parallels?
When Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman claimed to have stumbled upon a new crystalline chemical structure that seemed to violate the laws of nature, colleagues mocked him, insulted him and exiled him from his research group.
After years in the scientific wilderness, though, he was proved right. And on Wednesday, he received the ultimate vindication: the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The lesson?
“A good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” Shechtman said.
The shy, 70-year-old Shechtman said he never doubted his findings and considered himself merely the latest in a long line of scientists who advanced their fields by challenging the conventional wisdom and were shunned by the establishment because of it.
Challenging conventional wisdom? Now there’s an idea.
Read it here.
Australian Climate Madness 
The Warmists are anti-science.
Guess “humble pie” will be the main course on the menu of Prof. Dan Shechtman’s fellow chemists….
Another story link from Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/Health/Article.aspx?id=240734
Bravo, professor Shechtman. Congratulations.
I while back I posted at Climate Etc. on what it must be like working in the “settled” science. If you think about it, good scientists are supposed to be pioneers, breaking new ground. When you work in a “settled” science, you don’t break new ground, your just reworking the same old ground that someone else owns like a share cropper. Share cropper science is great for administrators as it brings in a lot of money (and as we know from M Mann’s review at Penn State, that the real measure of the quality of a scientist). However it has to be extraordinarily confining for a young scientist working in a field such as this since all the important answers are already believed to be known. How utterly boring. I don’t think the consensus scientists and the main stream media cheer leading section have any idea how much they’ve turned a fascinating subject into a sermon to snore through.
I’d recommend that everyone read the more detailed article at the unbearable nakedness of climate change. When I was going through graduate school more than 30 years ago, I have to admit that crystalography while interesting definitely seemed to be well established and used more as a tool to help other people characterize their research rather than as a hot field of study. I could never imagine anything controversial coming out of it. But the good stuff in science is the discovering the unexpected in unexpected places. It’s good to see that Dr. Shechtman realized what he had, persisted and now is recognized.
The Greens would have a problem with this point of view because Dan Schechtman is an Israeli, apparently just as evil as the filthy climate change deniers…
“… colleagues mocked him, insulted him and exiled him from his research group.”
I hope Dan followed the lead of our ‘climate’ scientists and reported the matter to the Police and the media … such outrageous behaviour.
Ohh … wait a minute … they were fellow scientists. Nevermind.
So it’s not just filthy deniers who apparently act like that!
@Tim Science is now politics and is openly being taught as such:
“…the Teachers College approach to teaching science: “Science education for social justice is transformative for all participants. Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity, but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives.”
Who knew carbon trading schemes could be so deadly?
“23 farmers in Honduras were slaughtered in cold blood by hired mercenaries as they tried to protect their land from being seized by a corporation who wanted to use the land to produce biofuels as part of a United Nations-accredited EU carbon trading scheme.”
It seems to be axiomatic for a nobel prize – Kimura was ridiculed for his “neutral theory” of evolution (as being “un Darwinian”), Marshall and Warren were laughed at for suggesting Helicobacter, not stress, caused ulcers.
Why would you blow the whistle on alarmism when that’s where the money is? When its loudest shriekers have high-paid, high-powered government jobs and can access hundreds of thousands more in extra private annual income (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/03/hansen-rakes-it-in/)? In Australia, Andrew Glickson, Andy Pitman and David Karoly are the self-appointed fund-raisers for climate alarmism and have rewarded their universities with hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding awarded by politicians and their public service proxies who are more prone than people in the real world with real jobs to the prevailing political fashions of the day. Real scientists – those with the greatest drive, curiosity and intellect – have to go along with the groupthink so as not to jeopardise science’s fightback against its own demise and the relentless rise of the humanities. Needless to say, the long-term damage to science will be immeasurable as the misappropriation of funds is revealed and real-world evidence refuses to cooperate with the scare.