Bernhard Brauer, you gave us no idea of what is quoted or who is
quoting.
But with the limited information you gave us, I have two points to make:
1) We can't all be experts in everything - An observational cosmologist
is not necessarily fluent in general relativity and a theoretical
cosmologist
doesn't necessarily know how to flat-field a CCD image and subtract
cosmic rays and dark-counts.
There is a reason that, when you build a house, you want the plumber
to
do the plumbing and the electrician to do the wiring - not the other
way
round. And they work together to build your house.
2) That is also why we have peer review - researchers with other slants
to
your work, review it from their perspective and catch your mistakes
and
weak points. Reproduceability is a similar safeguard - if nobody else
gets the same results, something is probably wrong with your work.
These processes ensure that science on average goes forward, albeit
slowly.
- Regner
Bernie Brauer wrote:
"Very few of us -- even those, such as myself, who have taken a
degree
in astronomy -- are able to understand what is being discussed in the
above paragraphs on cosmology -- except, perhaps, that such arcane
subjects are way beyond our ken. But while we may not be able to
understand much about this material, there is one feature of it that we
CAN understand, to
wit, that such subjects are not well-grasped by even the professionals
in
the field. I say this because here we have a small collection of
professionals who are checking out a mathematical proof, but are not
really
certain of its correctness, and thus can only claim that the result is
correct on the basis that other professionals have checked it, too. We
see here then a clear limit of even very able human minds -- that we
cannot be sure of ourselves unless we have had others to check what we
have said. That is an important lesson, and one which is only rarely
appreciated. In fact, we can carry the lesson further and observe that
most
people are very weak on logic -- so weak, it might be said, that they
cannot even think their way out of a paper bag."
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