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Mainpage - Original Post - Pioneer1 - angryphysicist - John Armstrong - Andrew Daw - Carl Brennan - Mark - RB - Stan - Urs SchriberStan Says:
May 17th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Agreed. Progress in physics requires a healthy mixture of respect for and skepticism of your predecessors.
Respect is important, because the previous work does accurately describe a great variety of natural phenomena. Throw it all out for a “revolutionary” idea, and you’ll find you don’t even get the basics right. There are too many cranks out there whose disrespect for the existing body of knowledge weakens their work considerably.
Skepticism is also necessary, because it drives you to find the implicit assumptions the previous work was based on. Those assumptions are probably correct, but it can’t hurt to flex them a bit and see what happens. From the experimental side (my area of interest), a little skepticism for established theory is good because that way you’ll occassionally look for things that “aren’t supposed to be there.” Again, you usually find nothing, but one unexpected result can be worth slogging through dozens of boring confirmations of existing theory.