Nearly all great scientists start out as heretics 

Nailing their theories to the door of conventional scientific wisdom. Galileo, Darwin and Einstein were all at some point in a minority of one; Alfred Wegener was dead before continental drift was taken seriously. So somewhere today there is a scientific heretic being ridiculed by the orthodox scientific clerisy, but who will later be recognised as a visionary. Trouble is, the fact that all great scientists were heretics does not mean that all heretics are right.

Science is plagued by self-proclaimed geniuses furious at the establishment's refusal to recognise their disproof of relativity. It is easy to judge heretics in retrospect. Ignaz Semmelweis was the Viennese physician who noticed in 1847 that doctors were killing women by not washing their hands in between dissecting corpses and delivering their babies. The death rate from childbed fever was twice as high for doctor-assisted births as it was for midwife-assisted births. But Semmelweis's reward for pointing this out was vilification, ostracism and eventually the insane asylum, where he died. All over the world, doctors resisted the idea of antiseptic hygiene. Take the surgeon who treated US president James Garfield after he was shot in 1881 - he invited colleagues to probe the wound with their fingers. Garfield died two months later from infection, not injury.That could never happen now, could it? Well, consider the case of Barry Marshall, the Australian medical researcher who in the 1980s suggested that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, not stress and spicy food. Antacid drugs were among the pharmaceutical industry's biggest cash cows at the time, and Marshall's theory was dismissed. So he infected himself by drinking a brew of Helicobacter pylori, then cured himself with antibiotics. The bacterial theory was still not accepted for many years, but it won him the Nobel prize in 2005. Or take dietary fat. As recounted in Gary Taubes's book The Diet Delusion, the hypothesis that fatty food was responsible for heart disease became an article of faith with the medical establishment despite studies failing to verify the link. But by citing only the relatively few studies that did find a correlation, and ignoring the ones that did not, a powerful body of evidence was assembled. Heretics who said that dietary carbohydrate mattered more were brushed aside until very recently.Yet I could cite just as many heretics who were ignored and were wrong. Peter Duesberg, who believes that HIV does not cause Aids, and Andrew Wakefield, who thought the MMR vaccine caused autism, have their tales of ranks closing against them, as do various kinds of intelligent designers. Right on the cusp of plausibility, in my view, lies the heresy championed by Edward Hooper in his book The River, that the Aids epidemic may have been started by trials of experimental polio vaccines in Congo and Burundi in the late 1950s. I hope it is not true, yet I have always thought the circumstantial evidence Hooper exhaustively gathered was strong enough to merit serious discussion. Early, live polio vaccines were indeed contaminated with animal viruses such as SV40; huge vaccine trials were done in the year before the oldest surviving HIV-positive blood sample was taken and in areas where Aids epidemics later broke out among the young adults likely to have been vaccinated as children; and a large chimpanzee colony was maintained for polio research by the very team developing the vaccine in the Congo (HIV is a chimp virus). But there are some good arguments against the theory: the family tree of the virus seems to show earlier infection of human beings, and no sample of chimp tissue used for locally amplifying the vaccine has ever come to light. Scientists are human. They allow their prejudices, their interests and their loyalties to get in the way of reason. Sometimes, ideas in science cannot prevail until their diehard opponents have died hard. Theory, it is said, advances "funeral by funeral". And as for the financial heretics? Yes, I also wish I had listened more to them.

This article was taken from the October issue of Wired UK magazine

Nearly all great  scientists start out as heretics 

Nailing their theories to the door of conventional scientific wisdom. Galileo, Darwin and Einstein were all at some point in a minority of one.

Alfred Wegener was dead before continental drift was taken seriously. So somewhere today there is a scientific heretic being ridiculed by the orthodox scientific clerisy, but who will later be recognised as a visionary. Trouble is, the fact that all great scientists were heretics does not mean that all heretics are right. Science is plagued by self-proclaimed geniuses furious at the establishment's refusal to recognise their disproof of relativity. It is easy to judge heretics in retrospect. Ignaz Semmelweis was the Viennese physician who noticed in 1847 that doctors were killing women by not washing their hands in between dissecting corpses and delivering their babies. The death rate from childbed fever was twice as high for doctor-assisted births as it was for midwife-assisted births. But Semmelweis's reward for pointing this out was vilification, ostracism and eventually the insane asylum, where he died. All over the world, doctors resisted the idea of antiseptic hygiene. Take the surgeon who treated US president James Garfield after he was shot in 1881 - he invited colleagues to probe the wound with their fingers. Garfield died two months later from infection, not injury.

That could never happen now, could it? Well, consider the case of Barry Marshall, the Australian medical researcher who in the 1980s suggested that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, not stress and spicy food. Antacid drugs were among the pharmaceutical industry's biggest cash cows at the time, and Marshall's theory was dismissed. So he infected himself by drinking a brew of Helicobacter pylori, then cured himself with antibiotics. The bacterial theory was still not accepted for many years, but it won him the Nobel prize in 2005. Or take dietary fat. As recounted in Gary Taubes's book The Diet Delusion, the hypothesis that fatty food was responsible for heart disease became an article of faith with the medical establishment despite studies failing to verify the link. But by citing only the relatively few studies that did find a correlation, and ignoring the ones that did not, a powerful body of evidence was assembled. Heretics who said that dietary carbohydrate mattered more were brushed aside until very recently.Yet I could cite just as many heretics who were ignored and were wrong. Peter Duesberg, who believes that HIV does not cause Aids, and Andrew Wakefield, who thought the MMR vaccine caused autism, have their tales of ranks closing against them, as do various kinds of intelligent designers. Right on the cusp of plausibility, in my view, lies the heresy championed by Edward Hooper in his book The River, that the Aids epidemic may have been started by trials of experimental polio vaccines in Congo and Burundi in the late 1950s. I hope it is not true, yet I have always thought the circumstantial evidence Hooper exhaustively gathered was strong enough to merit serious discussion. Early, live polio vaccines were indeed contaminated with animal viruses such as SV40; huge vaccine trials were done in the year before the oldest surviving HIV-positive blood sample was taken and in areas where Aids epidemics later broke out among the young adults likely to have been vaccinated as children; and a large chimpanzee colony was maintained for polio research by the very team developing the vaccine in the Congo (HIV is a chimp virus). But there are some good arguments against the theory: the family tree of the virus seems to show earlier infection of human beings, and no sample of chimp tissue used for locally amplifying the vaccine has ever come to light. Scientists are human. They allow their prejudices, their interests and their loyalties to get in the way of reason. Sometimes, ideas in science cannot prevail until their diehard opponents have died hard. Theory, it is said, advances "funeral by funeral". And as for the financial heretics? Yes, I also wish I had listened more to them.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2009/10/start/nearly-all-great-scientists-start-out-as-heretics

This article was taken from the October issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online

Nearly all great scientists start out as heretics nailing their theories to the door of conventional scientific wisdom. Galileo, Darwin and Einstein were all at some point in a minority of one; Alfred Wegener was dead before continental drift was taken seriously. So somewhere today there is a scientific heretic being ridiculed by the orthodox scientific clerisy, but who will later be recognised as a visionary. Trouble is, the fact that all great scientists were heretics does not mean that all heretics are right. Science is plagued by self-proclaimed geniuses furious at the establishment's refusal to recognise their disproof of relativity. It is easy to judge heretics in retrospect. Ignaz Semmelweis was the Viennese physician who noticed in 1847 that doctors were killing women by not washing their hands in between dissecting corpses and delivering their babies. The death rate from childbed fever was twice as high for doctor-assisted births as it was for midwife-assisted births. But Semmelweis's reward for pointing this out was vilification, ostracism and eventually the insane asylum, where he died. All over the world, doctors resisted the idea of antiseptic hygiene. Take the surgeon who treated US president James Garfield after he was shot in 1881 - he invited colleagues to probe the wound with their fingers. Garfield died two months later from infection, not injury.That could never happen now, could it? Well, consider the case of Barry Marshall, the Australian medical researcher who in the 1980s suggested that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, not stress and spicy food. Antacid drugs were among the pharmaceutical industry's biggest cash cows at the time, and Marshall's theory was dismissed. So he infected himself by drinking a brew of Helicobacter pylori, then cured himself with antibiotics. The bacterial theory was still not accepted for many years, but it won him the Nobel prize in 2005. Or take dietary fat. As recounted in Gary Taubes's book The Diet Delusion, the hypothesis that fatty food was responsible for heart disease became an article of faith with the medical establishment despite studies failing to verify the link. But by citing only the relatively few studies that did find a correlation, and ignoring the ones that did not, a powerful body of evidence was assembled. Heretics who said that dietary carbohydrate mattered more were brushed aside until very recently.Yet I could cite just as many heretics who were ignored and were wrong. Peter Duesberg, who believes that HIV does not cause Aids, and Andrew Wakefield, who thought the MMR vaccine caused autism, have their tales of ranks closing against them, as do various kinds of intelligent designers. Right on the cusp of plausibility, in my view, lies the heresy championed by Edward Hooper in his book The River, that the Aids epidemic may have been started by trials of experimental polio vaccines in Congo and Burundi in the late 1950s. I hope it is not true, yet I have always thought the circumstantial evidence Hooper exhaustively gathered was strong enough to merit serious discussion. Early, live polio vaccines were indeed contaminated with animal viruses such as SV40; huge vaccine trials were done in the year before the oldest surviving HIV-positive blood sample was taken and in areas where Aids epidemics later broke out among the young adults likely to have been vaccinated as children; and a large chimpanzee colony was maintained for polio research by the very team developing the vaccine in the Congo (HIV is a chimp virus). But there are some good arguments against the theory: the family tree of the virus seems to show earlier infection of human beings, and no sample of chimp tissue used for locally amplifying the vaccine has ever come to light. Scientists are human. They allow their prejudices, their interests and their loyalties to get in the way of reason. Sometimes, ideas in science cannot prevail until their diehard opponents have died hard. Theory, it is said, advances "funeral by funeral". And as for the financial heretics? Yes, I also wish I had listened more to them.

A revolutionary theory on the origin of the Earth


In this article I will try, and subsequently introduce some elements of a theory of planetary evolution which implies a profound change in contemporary beliefs.  It is based on the arguments of several authors suggesting new insights about the origins and dynamics of our planet (see bibliography).

Introduction
A paradigm that resists to be changed
The paradigm of normal science defined by Thomas S. Kuhn is the set of theories, rules, procedures and knowledge that permeate a particular society at a particular time in its history. Today it regards scientific "model" widely adopted in contemporary global society.
The subject of planetary evolution, currently restricted to the generally accepted "theory of plate tectonics" with a constant volume planet complemented by hypothesis ("fossil") biological origin of petroleum are established paradigmatic areas that resist be changed despite the numerous data which should induce radical and thorough review.

In this "globalized" society would mean that the official scientific construction work through the accumulation of scientific data that would allow "progress" in knowledge, in particular achieving greater detail in the specific application of accepted scientific models.
Unfortunately, there is no official method in this paradigm (or any other dominant paradigm) that would establish "whole model" to accept other theories and apply other rules or procedures to finish modifying it radically.
For that reason, in the field of planetary geology it is very difficult to rethink the validity of many concepts whose validity is being contradicted every day by reality.
The difficulty of changing the official paradigm lies in the fact that this modification would also alter the relations of power.
Politically, those who hold "the paradigmatic power" are the same that control decision-making mechanisms. From the economic point of view they are the ones who benefit from the decisions made based on the officially accepted postulates
In the academic sphere they are the people who defend their prestige and economic security that the professional or academic positions they occupy give and consider that they would be eventually threatened by a possible change of paradigm (Lovelock, 1988).
We have no doubt that sooner or later the paradigm shift will occur. When the critical mass of researchers and scientists and support of the public is sufficient, when the decades pass and new data become available confirming the new vision of the history and dynamics of our planet, the power structures will give way and new paradigm will be officially accepted.
At that time the conditions will be created to redefine the necessary political and economic strategies allowing to develop and establish a new approach to human relationships with planetary resources and environments.
(to be continued)
The blog in Spanish is:  daniloanton.blogspot.com