George Will Officially Loses His Mind

More piling on Poor George, for his act of confusing political punditry with science and the acceptability within each discipline of just making stuff up to make a point. But within the arguments, Tom brings up another example that hasn’t been horribly contaminated with politicium:

To get a handle on this last point, leap out of politically (not scientifically) charged areas like the study of anthropogenic climate change. Sixteen years after Einstein had worked out the special theory of relativity, which eliminated the concept the ether as the medium within which light waves travelled, word came of an experiment that seemed to have detected an ether “wind” — the effect produced by the motion of the earth through an ether. Einstein responded with perhaps his most quoted aphorism: Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht – Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not!

Einstein was, of course, correct, and the reported experiment was wrong. The moral of the story, in this context, is that while it is true that a single contrary result is enough to demolish established theory — that result had better damn well hold up.

And that’s something that needs to be understood about the process. Support for a theory is a body of evidence, and if a contrary data point comes up, it is investigated to see if there’s really new science there, or if it’s the result of a statistical fluke, an experiment that lacks some rigor, or even fraud. One of the foundations of science is repeatability — scientists try and replicate results, and if nobody can do so, the result is suspect. A hundred years later there are still those who contort themselves to tear down relativity, but all they can point to is a handful of experiments that show questionable results, as compared to a vastly larger pile of experiments that confirm the theory. The beautiful theory can be slain by an ugly fact, but one has to actually confirm that it is indeed a fact that one has uncovered.