Daniel Rocha <danieldi...@gmail.com> wrote: If one is advocating it, this limitation should be overcome. With 50k$, a > year, that is possible, either by self learning or going to an university. >
I believe you are suggesting that with $50,000 per year, Krivit might study by himself or attend classes at a university to the point where he could master these theories and make credible critique of the W-L theory. I do not think that is possible. Take Mizuno for example. He earned a PhD studying with Bockris, who was a notorious slave driver who expected top notch work and made his students work 80-hour weeks. Mizuno has decades of practical experience in chemistry. Yet he says he cannot understand these theories. As I said, I know several other scientists with similar deep backgrounds and experience who cannot understand the theories well enough to debate which is best, or even which has merit. If people like this cannot debate the issue, I doubt that Krivit could after a few years of school after reading some textbooks. Modern physics is extremely complicated. It is not something you can master in your spare time, and probably not after you pass age 30. That would be like trying to become a concert pianist in your 30s when you had only amateur-level training in high school. It may be that these theories are particularly complicated and difficult to learn because they are wrong. I wouldn't know, but in the past incorrect theories have often been complicated than correct ones. In the book "The Double Helix" Watson wrote that he could not make head or tail of the theories proposed to explain cellular reproduction before 1952. They were over his head. He paid no attention to them. It turned out they were all completely wrong. He discovered the actual cause, and it was relatively simple. (Simple enough that even I understand it in some depth.) There are some disciplines you can master to the farthest extent anyone can go in a few years. Learning a modern foreign language for example. Once you can read an adult level book, understand a movie, conduct business or write a speech or newspaper column in another language, you may not be a native speaker but you have mastered it. No language is more intrinsically complicated than any other, because children everywhere master their own languages by age 5. There other disciplines such as physics or biology in which the amount that can be learned is far greater than any individual can master -- or even hear about. In the mid-19th century there were still a few people who could understand every major development in these fields, but that is impossible now. I think that is one of the reasons the pace of progress in science is slowing down, and why it has taken 22 years for people to accept cold fusion. Science is too big and too complicated for the human mind. - Jed
