Bill Nye the Science Guy: Skepticblog » Bill Nye Selling Out to The Man?
I can’t believe he’s still a freeman.
Ditto Keppler, if not more so.
There’s physicst Philipp Lenard of “Lenard Tube” fame, who during WWII became an over-the-top anti-semite and “Chief of Aryan Science” under Hitler.
That is why Galileo did not take Kepler seriously, and why Newton did (and, of course, Newton was right.)
Robert Knox, renowned Scottish surgeon and anatomist, became a pariah when it was found out that he had been buying cadavers from murderers Burke and Hare.
One could argue that Knox’s motives were not ignoble, in seeking to advance knowledge of anatomy. Nor was he unique in obtaining bodies by illicit means, plenty of surgeons bought them from the sack-'em-up men.
Sir William Herschel believed that a race of intelligent beings resided inside the Sun.
Interesting recent article in the Times about this. It adds some fascinating perspective: Moonlighting as a Conjurer of Chemicals.
It might be worth mentioning that experiments in topics or areas that are widely considered wacky or woo-woo does not automatically mean that one is not engaged in real science. One could set up a scientifically valid experiment on, say, the efficacy of rubbing a crystal on your forehead on the healing of surgical wounds. I think that it would show that the effect is non-existant, but without the experiment, I have no scientific standing for that view. For a lot of these scientists, it isn’t that they veer off into weird subjects. It’s that they use unscientific methods or cling to opinions despite scientific evidence to the contrary.
He wasn’t a scientist, but it might be worth mentioning Arthur Conan Doyle. He wrote the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which are all about the ability of close observation and scientific reasoning to puzzle through any situation, but he became a credulous devotee of some of the most nonsensical forms of spiritualism, like the existence of fairies.
There was Lord Kelvin, who made immeasurable contributions to physics, and then decided (first) there was no future in aviation, except for balloons and (a couple years later) there was nothing left to discover - only to measure more precisely. Five years after that, Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity.
Absolutely. The guy became a crackpot, wanting to excavate harbors in Alaska with nuclear devices while denying that fallout might be a problem and falsely reporting test results in Nevada. On the plus side, his attempt to jam this nutty idea up the asses of the Alaska Inuits resulted in the first ever Environmental Impact Study, which thankfully put the kibosh on the whole notion.
Completely unaccomplished in the context of this thread, absolutely. He wrote a dissertation which went onto the shelf at the UM library and wasn’t touched again until after he was arrested. Not arguing that the guy wasn’t a genius… just saying that Astro’s assertion that his arrest ruined his reputation mistakenly assumes the guy had a reputation at all. Nobody had heard of the guy.
Nope, wrong.
That blog entry isn’t very competent, and also is incredibly dishonest. The topic is somewhat well known, I recall articles about it in the last five years: if you stick platinum electrodes in water and run it at DC, one side becomes acidic and the other side becomes basic. One side becomes full of dissolved O2, the other side H2 (and certainly nanobubbles are coming out of solution. That’s how electrolysis makes H2 and O2 gas after all.) In those old articles IIR they were using the effect for its disinfectant properties.
So, this Bill Nye recommended company is selling an expensive electric water-treatment device, but the blog author distorts this to make it sound like they’re selling expensive magic water. No, it isn’t water; it’s an electrolyzer. Perhaps it’s overpriced, but there’s a big difference between “$300 bottle of water” and “$300 piece of electronics.” One commenter pointed this out, and suggested that the blogger do some actual research, but this apparently was ignored.
I’d certainly remove Bill Nye from this list.
Crookes and Rayleigh as well. Big spiritism promotors. I think Crookes nearly got booted out of the Royal Society.
Maybe he was thinking of Miles Dyson.
This is the 1970s computer science view of Chomsky, but it has very little to do with reality.
First of all, for the past 15-20 years, Chomsky has been arguing that deep structure is unnecessary and irrelevant, and probably doesn’t exist. So, criticizing him for harping on it is pretty silly.
Second, while Chomsky often acts as if testable consequences of his theories are irrelevant, they still do have testable consequences, and other linguists regularly test them.
The real problem with Chomsky (within linguistics) is he has a very hard time formulating a new idea without replacing the entire surrounding paradigm at the same time. This means that every 10-15 years, the entire field wastes 5-10 years reformulating all of the existing work in the new paradigm, working out where the two differ, and testing the differences. Usually (not always) the new idea does turn out to solve a major problem, or to simplify a whole area of the theory, or whatever, so people listen. But I’m pretty sure that most or all of his new ideas could have been formulated in the previous paradigm, avoiding all that wasted work.