Steve Wing, a scientist?

[Rudi Nussbaum <d4rn@pdx.edu>]

Jay MacLellan (07/31/00) reverts back to an ancient criterion for
deciding on the scientific qualifications of a "scientist", specifically
applied here to Steve Wing . It was used by the Roman Catholic
Church in 1633 against Galileo: He should be burned at the stake because 
"[he] came to the opposite conclusion our training and logic said was
correct." This opinion was shared by his mainstream astronomer
contemporaries, quoting Aristotle.
Didn't we have several scientific revolutions since then, that showed that
scientific progress was achieved by individual heretic's radical
challenges to then equally unquestioned tenets held by the mainstream
scientific community?

Otto Raabe (dated 05/31/00 but posted 07/312/00), more subtly, seems to
apply a similar criterion based on accepted authority when he implies
that Wing's (thus, also Alice Stewart's) conclusions must be wrong since
they "conflict with the published results of the atomic bomb survivor
studies."

Yet Raabe concedes that Wing is "bright and sincere". Would that not
force his scientific opponents to work harder and seriously discuss and
if they can, refute the evidence presented in numerous papers that
provides reasonable explanations for the glaring discrepancies between
a number of studies of nuclear workers and those of the A-bomb survivors?
To dismiss Wing's and Stewart's findings primarily on the unquestioned
authority of "the conclusions our training . . .  said was
correct" (MacLellan) is acceptance of authority, not freely
queswtioning science. 
Rudi H. Nussbaum



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