Re: Are physicists arrogant ?


srp wrote:
I can't imagine a top notch physicist being so little interested
by his own research (supposedly his main interest in life) wasting
his spare time making a hobby of sparring with commoners, putting
them down at the least misplaced comma as they are trying to
express their often fragmentary view of some question or other
in physics, as I have consistently seen many "physicists" do here
for years instead of informing them. Not only putting them down,
but freely ad hominem attacking them, kook lists and all.

What are those idiots afraid of really, that a crowd of commoners
will hijack formal journals and succeed in having their personal
theories overwhelm the well founded pool? Come on!


This is not only a poor assumption but a somewhat disingenuous one.
Assuming that no *real* physicist would be interested in spending time
on a physics newsgroup implies that no post would come under the
examination of a real physicist. This implies that someone posting as a
physics hobbyist could assume that he is in a community of his peers,
with generally no more knowledge or insight than the poster. In fact,
I've detected that attitude among several posters here. ("You can't
possibly tell me I'm wrong, because you can't possibly know what you're
talking about, because no physicist would post here.") People who post
here with that attitude are exhibiting cowardice, risking no serious
appraisal of their thinking by revealing it only to an unqualified
audience.

As for the implied request about "informing them", I think you'll find
that if people post with an honest question, they get an informative
answer. People who post with an attitude that says "Current science
must be wrong, here are my alternative hypotheses" are less likely to
be informed because they do not exhibit an interest in being informed.

PD

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