Scientists as a community has always exiled and persecuted dissident voices. There is a long and distinguished record in history of this.
In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis was telling doctors delivering babies to wash their hands, and for that was involuntarily committed to a mental institution, beaten, and died.
Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift, and plate tectonics, in 1912, and was roundly criticized for it.
We all know about Galileo.
What the Guardian is doing is no different than any other time in history.
The practice of science requires doubt, and scientific knowledge is only as good as the latest experiment that proves it.
Another example: when the Big Bang theory was first proposed, Hubble and the other Steady State adherents (who thought that the galaxy had existed without change and that there was no "creation") mocked it, because the Catholic and Orthodox churches embraced it. But Hubble was an accepted scientist, so we name shit after him.
Scientists as a community has always exiled and persecuted dissident voices. There is a long and distinguished record in history of this.
In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis was telling doctors delivering babies to wash their hands, and for that was involuntarily committed to a mental institution, beaten, and died.
Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift, and plate tectonics, in 1912, and was roundly criticized for it.
We all know about Galileo.
What the Guardian is doing is no different than any other time in history.
The practice of science requires doubt, and scientific knowledge is only as good as the latest experiment that proves it.
Another example: when the Big Bang theory was first proposed, Hubble and the other Steady State adherents (who thought that the galaxy had existed without change and that there was no "creation") mocked it, because the Catholic and Orthodox churches embraced it. But Hubble was an accepted scientist, so we name shit after him.
And now ironically the Webb telescope is calling the BBT itself into question.