(meteorobs) Comet theories. A challenge.

[Jim Rosenstock]

--- In meteorobs at yahoogroups.com, <stange34 at ...> wrote:
>
> Read the highlighted Red first, Then the White, followed by the 
blue.
> 
> Take 2 asprin with a glass of water at 5 min. intervals.
> 
>   http://www.holoscience.com/news/comet_borrelly.html
> 
> YCS

Oh, dear.

Perhaps you've read Martin Gardner's seminal work on crackpot 
science?  Originally published in the early 1950s as "In the
Name of Science", and later updated and reissued as "Fads and 
Fallacies in the Name of Science", Gardner covers a long list of 
crackpot "scientists" and other more overt frauds over the years. In 
his work Gardner wrote a perceptive "psychological profile" of the 
typical crackpot scientist...here's Wikipedia's summary:
> 
> Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science was
> expanded from an article
> first published in the Antioch Review in 1950[2],
> which became the first
> chapter of the book; chapter one explains the
> attraction of science to
> "cranks" and "pseudo scientists", who he describes
> as having five
> invariable characteristics:
> 
> The pseudo-scientist has a profound intellectual
> superiority complex. 
> The pseudo-scientist regards other researchers as
> idiotic, and always
> operates outside the peer review system (hence the
> title of the original
> Antioch Review article, "The Hermit Scientist"). 
> The pseudo-scientist believes there is a campaign
> against their ideas, a
> campaign compared with the persecution of Galileo or
> Pasteur. 
> Instead of side-stepping the mainstream the
> pseudo-scientist attacks it
> head-on: The most revered scientist is Einstein so
> Gardner writes that
> Einstein is the most likely establishment figure to
> be attacked. He writes:
> "A perpetual motion machine cannot be built. He
> builds one". 

Cheers,

Jim