Science Needs Authority

A quickie – Several scientific commentators suggesting www.sciencenews.org is on a par with www.physics.org when it comes to posting low grade speculative (mischievous?) non-science into wider public media. [Previously here, When is Science News? with footnotes added.]

Latest example from Sabine Hossenfelder on FB
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/negative-mass-might-not-defy-einstein
(Super-duper-symmetry maybe ? I said, tongue in cheek.)

Science depends on authority – not on free publication. People who reject authority are militant freedom extremists – anarchists we used to call them. But of course there is interesting information behind the story – on what might be wrong with the “standard model(s)” – but it’s not “science news”. Not news from science to the wider world of applied reality, it’s part of the churn within science, which may still be newsworthy, but needs to be presented as such, with suitable disclaimers.

[Post Note : And as well as footnotes to the “When is Science News?” link above, some more here, again from Sabine:

More technical clarification on the above story:
http://backreaction.blogspot.se/2014/11/negative-mass-in-general-relativity.html
Oh, and notice “an entirely theoretical construct” (the mass in the news story), but yet again the Gravitational Constant is part of the argument – the contingent aspects lie deep in this space, a lot could unravel.

And more follow-up to what went wrong with BICEP story:
http://sci.esa.int/planck/55059-conference-announcement-planck-2014/

So it goes.]

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