{"id":8705,"date":"2011-05-20T03:00:09","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T08:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=8705"},"modified":"2011-05-20T03:00:09","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T08:00:09","slug":"science-is-not-a-wrestling-match","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/8705","title":{"rendered":"Science is Not a Wrestling Match"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/coraifeartaigh.wordpress.com\/2011\/05\/12\/refuting-einstein-a-media-controversy-in-ireland\/\">Refuting Einstein: a media controversy in Ireland<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>At first, professional physicists paid very little attention to the story. In the few instances where their opinion was sought, the \u2018debate\u2019 was portrayed as one voice against another, not as the overwhelming consensus of 100 years of scientific evidence against one engineer. Most of all, the debate was portrayed as <em>Kelly vs Einstein<\/em> \u2013 I do not recall a single journalist draw attention to the fact that physicists\u2019 belief in relativity stems not from a belief in Einstein, but from the mountain of experimental evidence that supports the theory (a confusion of the context of <em>discovery<\/em> with the context of <em>justification<\/em>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The author makes a lot of good observations about what&#8217;s bad in science journalism, most of which I agree with and have pointed out a number of times in the past, such as manufacturing controversy  by making it appear that both sides have equal merit.  Sacrificing scientific accuracy for the sake of the appearance of neutrality is something that ultimately <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/7723\">undermines your credibility<\/a>.  When the average reader gets the message that relativity is a religion, you&#8217;re doing it wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Refuting Einstein: a media controversy in Ireland At first, professional physicists paid very little attention to the story. In the few instances where their opinion was sought, the \u2018debate\u2019 was portrayed as one voice against another, not as the overwhelming &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/8705\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}