Do you believe in Magic?

03-16-12: Sabai
Science is often used in the service of those with special agendas. Science can be used and has historically been systematically used to arrive at pre-determined conclusions. Science is often fraudulent. So-called "scientific scrutiny" is often just an exercise in smoke and mirrors.

I don't disagree that SOME scientific research fits this description. But your characterization gives the impression that you believe that a LARGE FRACTION of scientific research is, to use your word, fraudulent. If that is what you believe, then I would say that you have probably been exposed to a MISrepresentative sample of scientific research.

Consider the following discoveries, each paradigmatic examples of scientific research...

The Periodic Table
Newtonian mechanics
Copernican Heliocentrism
The Germ Theory of disease
Electromagnetism
Evolution of Species by Natural Selection
Atomic Theory
Radioactivity
Special Relativity
General Relativity
Plate tectonics
DNA
Thermodynamics
Radio waves
X rays
Quantum Mechanics
Penicillin
Anesthesia

...and on and on it goes.

For each of these historic discoveries, there is a veritable mountain of subsequent scientific research. Tens of thousands of scientists working on every continent over centuries. Can you possibly believe that a large fraction of these researchers are conducting fraudulent research? If science is that fraudulent, how did it eradicate Polio? How did it put a man on the moon? How did it put cell phones in the hands of 87% of the world's population?

For whatever you think they're worth, those kinds of achievements would be all but impossible if the scientific research upon which those technologies are based were in fact fraudulent.

I suspect that you've had some bad experiences with folks who you identify as scientists, and that has colored your perception of science more generally. If those experiences were with physicians, as your examples seem to suggest, then I would say this: A physician is rarely a scientist, either in temperament or in training. Judging the whole of science on the basis of some abusive medical practices is like judging the whole of world literature on the basis of comic books.

Bryon

any publicity is good publicity & from the looks of Geofkait & Capt Coconuts sales feedback they don't need any help. these guys are cleaning some clocks. PT Barnum woulda loved it.

Bryon,
Please see my latest posting. It explains more of what I am getting at. Ideally, science works the way you have described. In fact, it does not always turn out that way because of special interests and political agendas, especially in the field of medicine.

Bryon and Cbw723,
I find Paul Kaplan's comments (of Paul Kaplan Cable) on the importance of empirical evaluation relevant here. His views reflect my own views on this subject. I believe they also reflect on high end audio in general.

"While my access to sophisticated measurement tools confirmed much of my “lower resolution,” lower frequency investigations, it also confirmed that measurements don’t account for much of a cables performance. This isn’t to say that ultimately metrics won't be found that correlate more accurately with performance, or that one can’t make a horrible cable based on known measurements."

"But to make a really excellent cable, one must combine technical knowledge with tedious, empirical evaluation. You’ve got to build, listen, make another with a single specific change, listen, evaluate, decide what characteristics may account for a given measureable and/or subjective change, and build yet another to hopefully verify. Repeat until done."

Well so long as we're all quoting each other, here's a snippet from my email exchange with the goobermeister concerning his opinion of Audiogon's members:

"Now there's a group of distiction.  Not exactly the faculty of Harvard.  If you know what I mean.  LOL"

But he sure doesn't laugh at you when taking your money.
Caveat emptor folks.