(3089/898) Facts and ... facts?

1887) I thought about getting funding for a grant to study graffiti. Clearly, graffiti is the work of space aliens. It's too complex and patterned to be the product of natural forces. It couldn't be a prank because no one could create such complex patterns overnight in a public place, without being noticed. Therefore, ipso facto, post hoc ergo propter hoc, ALIENS.

As final evidence, consider that the government has published absolutely no studies on the alien-graffiti connection. Therefore, those studies must all be top top secret. Therefore, there must be a really important story which the government is hiding from us!!!

Zenon M. Feszczak
posted on [IDM] (8/5/1996)

1888) [In his book The End of Science, John] Horgan argues [...] the big [scientific] problems that can be solved have been solved, and the big ones that haven't been solved can't be solved. Where does this leave contemporary scientists? The can either pursue small, manageable and vaguely boring science (sequencing the complete complement of human DNA may fall into this category), or they can turn to what Mr. Horgan calls "ironic science." Such science is "speculative, postempirical," resembling literary criticism "in that it offers points of view, opinions, which are, at best, interesting." Ironic science is provocative, he says, but it fails to converge on the truth. "It cannot achieve empirically verifiable surprises that force scientists to make substantial revisions in their basic descriptions of reality."

Natalie Anger
"The Job Is Finished" in
New York Times Book Review (6/30/1996)
[reviewing, and quoting from,
The End of Science (1996)
by John Horgan]

1889) The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Thomas Huxley
"Biogenesis and Abiogenesis" in
Collected Essays (1894) [ODQ]
quoted by Arlene S. Skolnick in
The Psychology of Human Development (1986)
posted by Amy Denise Osborn [IQM] (7/21/1996)