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Big Puzzle Thinker
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For a long time now I have pondered over our universal acceptance of empirical science, our methods, our successes...and its drawbacks. At the same time, I see a whole lot of unanswered questions, some of them "factual", but because they cannot be the subject of grant or that it requires a willingness to gamble your future or the likelyhood of zero returns or, most often, for our current impossibility to tackle a quantitative description, that our methods cast the 2nd class citizens aside.
We, scientists, sometimes appear to be threatened by any potential sputtering from these grey-zone facts on our professional lives. I have read comments by physicists of great repute destroying any attempt to diverge funds, or efforts, into these "grey facts" ignoring, in some instances, that tremendous scientific and technological progress could be derived from a closer look.
Aware, as we all are of the limits for research funds, the current decision on policy makers is not an easy one. With all that said, many issues of grey-science may just be helped by widening the spectra of possibilities, from the current science or trash, to several other possible alternative so that to talk or to tackle them may not be construed, automatically, that one "went native" on witch-town.
Lets have small pots of money for grey-zone science, of small probability but tremendous pay-offs. Let's discuss which are the "grey-facts" that are most deserving or promising. If we don't, I am sure we will still, with our current methods, catch up with these grey-facts, but it will take a tremendous amount of time, till the quantitative understanding of the underlying phenomena is decoded.
The Office of Science at DOE will soon re-review cold fusion...we may find that there isn't anything new about this subject -except for the larger number of researchers in it -. But, I motion, is a step in this direction.
Lets be comfortable with well formed scientists putting their wits to investigate grey-science, instead of casting tremendous science opportunities as undeserving of our attention.
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