Quote:
Originally Posted by Karls48
Paul, can you please explain what makes scientist different from for example – politicians, bankers or car salesman?
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The same difference as the between a politician and your average ice in space poster. People (except for politicians) are just people, they aren't perfect, make mistakes, have egos, desire popularity, power and influence to greater and lesser degrees.
It is not that scientist are different, but the process of science is different. Science is done in the open, with people publishing their theories and results for all to see and criticise. And believe me, that criticism can be vicious. Ideally, theories can be scrutinised to see what predictions they make and this can be followed up experiment to either confirm them or not. The process makes it is hard for an individual or group of individuals to conspire, hide or fake results, because there are many rivals out there who try to either replicate or find fault with each result or publication.
A few years ago I was following an argument about the possible discovery of a "cosmic string". What these are is not relevant here, but basically it came down to whether two close, but non-interacting galaxies were mirror images of each other. The guy proposing this had his initial papers torn to shreds by the community, but he kept persisting making more and more measurements. And in the end, his and others more precise measurements showed a key difference between the two galaxies. This criticism drove him to create better and better observations to try and prove his theory, he just turned out to be wrong.
Cheers,
Paul