Honest question that I thought maybe some of you could help me with as I know several of you are very passionate about these topics. When and Where did Scientific Consensus come to be? I remember learning about Theory and Laws in school but never about consensus.
One of the worst things to happen to science in my opinion is that scientific consensus gave rise to closed theories. The scientific method should not allow for closed theories. On the history side Heisenberg was the leading proponent of the closing of physics theories starting in the 1920s, but more publicly in the 1930s and onward. This has had terrible consequences with respect to the progress in fundamental physics. The second big problem is the process of peer review leads to rejection of papers that do not follow the consensus often without regard to the actual merits of the paper. Once again this is not in keeping with the scientific method. I will add a good paper on the history of the closing of physics.The Link
Raydog, That's interesting concerning the history of theory in physics. Would you agree that one problem in theoretical physics is that conjecture has too often taken the place of data?
