"The structure of scientific revolutions"
Greenwin on e-cat world cited the work of Thomas Kuhn and in particular his masterpiece: "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
on the CNAM website a reading sheet sums up his point of view very well, and the parallel with the aberrant situation in the field of Cold Fusion is absolutely obvious.
http://www.cnam.fr/servlet/com.univ....=1295877018064
It was he who popularized the expression "paradigm shift".
His vision is that science advances by progress interrupted by ideological ruptures, "paradigm shifts".
At this point normal science, as a community and as a corpus of practices and knowledge, is challenged by anomalies that it cannot resolve.
She rejects them and ignores them.
Then some try to explain them in the existing framework, and fail.
There a new, heretical paradigm is proposed which resolves the anomaly
The installed scientific community rejects this explanation, ridicules it
Finally the new paradigm is accepted because it explains things better.
When we read the review we understand that:
the new paradigm will not convince simply because the old one does not work. This new paradigm must offer a complete and coherent vision of the world, which works much better than the previous one. This is where the experimental results without credible theoretical explanations cannot convince ... and this contrary to the mythology of the scientific method which affirms that the facts should prevail over the theories ... vision of bisounours of science.
It is thus clearly said that one cannot win against the old paradigm with evidence. Installed science chooses the facts that suit it, and rejects those that disturb it. In the end, the two paradigms are incomparable (in the algebraic sense) because each one chooses its criteria which suits it. I thus saw with what bad time one demanded a reproducibility with cold fusion, when the hypotheses of artifact of measurement were not even checked. in a scientific world of bisounours, a fact reproduced 2 or 3 times is the proof of an anomaly, and cancels any negative result. It is not a contest of evidence, but a dialogue of the deaf, where political power is more important than evidence.
The new paradigm can only be accepted if it offers a huge advantage to its supporters, if it works much better than the previous one We understand that for cold fusion, as long as industrial applications did not seem possible, the evidence does not had no interest and no chance of convincing.
It appears (and all those who know the scientific community inside and have not lost their souls know it) that scientific debates are very far from debates about evidence, but are human battles, of power, political and ideological battles, with the key to very prosaic issues of power, money, ego. This is where I make the link with Roland Benabou's theory on the "mutual assured delusion", "the collectively assured illusion".
if not the book, the review should be read.
This completes well the works of Nassim Nicholas Taleb on black swans, and the articles of Roaldn benabou.
Today 07:44 nothing new but good a little reading does not hurt.
Fortunately, Galileo did not follow the consensus of his time, because the earth would not have turned! "(Claude Allégre) I don't like Allègre but it's not bad.
) and who plays the knights righting wrongs, and who goes on a crusade at the slightest "unscientific detail" that exceeds .... Dedeleco, there is a new generation! 
