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donkeyrock shared this story from  Dr. Malcolm Kendrick.
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I love reading about the history of science. In part, because I think you can learn so much about the process of thinking itself. Especially when it goes wrong. More especially when you are looking at the process of immunisation.
Immunisation is something that Karl Popper was particularly interested in. Popper was a scientific philosopher who is a bit of a hero of mine (when I can actually understand what he is saying). Amongst many other things, he was interested in the techniques used by scientists to protect favoured scientific hypotheses, which he called ‘immunisations’.
An immunisation is essentially a way of explaining why a fact, which appears to contradict a favoured hypothesis, does not actually contradict it at all. For example, when it was found that the orbit of the planet mercury could not be explained by classical Newtonian physics, a mathematician called Le Verrier postulated that there must be another, smaller, planet inside the orbit of Mercury that was affecting Mercury’s orbit. The planet Vulcan.
Vulcan was invisible – primarily because it did not exist. But for many years the invisible and non-existent planet served its purpose. It protected classical Newtonian physics from a potential contradiction, or refutation. Or, to be more blunt, of being simply wrong. In this case, scientists were quite happy to believe in invisible non-existent things, if the alternative was to cast aside a hallowed hypothesis.
Of course, this is just one of thousands of examples whereby unwelcome facts have been simply swatted aside, or immunised against. It is not just the Catholic Church that refuses to look through telescopes.
Vulcan, although just one example, does provide a good case study of a widely used form of immunisation tactic, the ‘ad-hoc’ hypothesis. An ad-hoc hypothesis is a secondary hypothesis that is bolted on to the side of the main hypothesis in order to defend it, or protect it. A more recent example of this can be seen in the Global warming debate.
It has been noted that global temperatures have not increased by much, if at all, in the last 15 years. This, however, is not viewed as a contradiction to the hypothesis of man-made global warming. Why not? Because it is argued that the oceans are taking in the excess heat, and trapping it. This process has held back the degree of global warming that had been predicted by the experts.
I am not going to debate whether or not this is true. I am just using …read more
Source:: Donkeyrock_BlurBlog
