Author takes swipe at scientific elite: The upper echelons of the scientific community were yesterday accused of "usually being wrong" and guilty of "a systematic resistance to discovery", at the Guardian Hay book festival.
The attack came from Nigel Calder, author of Magic Universe: the Oxford guide to modern science [...]
Calder criticised leading scientists for having forgotten that big new scientific discoveries, which remain to be uncovered in many fields, can overturn widely held beliefs.
"In any branch of science there are only two possibilities. There is either nothing left to discover, in which case, why work on it, or there are big discoveries yet to be made, in which case, what the scientists say now is likely to be false," he said. "The problem is, the top scientists seem to have forgotten that."
The result is a generation of scientists who have become a little too confident that their understanding of the world is more scientifically accurate than it will be proved to be.
