Science Self-Corrects
26 Dec '13 21:59http://www.nbcnews.com/science/whoops-earths-oldest-diamonds-actually-polishing-grit-2D11805932
As much glory can be had by convincingly refuting an experiment's results as corroborating them!
Those who believe evolution is a "lie" or climate science is a "religion" have much more than the empirical evidence going against them. They're going against the established way science and scientists work, day by day, century after century. Getting thousands of scientists to conspire to perpetuate a falsehood for years on end for the sinister purpose of, say, advancing atheism (via the "lie" of evolution) or socialism (via the "myth" of global warming) would be as impossible as herding a million cats.
Conspiratorial thinking is not thinking at all, it is an exercise in cherry-picking the data to make it fit a preconceived pattern. It is the true hallmark of a religion, and that is why science is not a religion.
Evidence of Earth's first continents — 4.3-billion-year-old "diamonds" — are actually just fragments of polishing grit, a new study finds.Those evil scientists! Always conspiring amongst themselves to dupe the masses into believing Earth is much older than it is! Oh, but wait…
In 2007, an international team first reported discovering the tiny gems, which hid in pockets inside zircon crystals from Western Australia's Jack Hills, in the journal Nature. But it turns out that the gems weren't actually diamonds, but polishing paste, smushed into hairs'-width cracks when the zircons were prepared for laboratory tests, according to a study published online in the Feb. 1, 2014, edition of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
But some scientists, including Dobrzhinetskaya, were suspicious of the findings, because Menneken and her colleagues polished the zircons with diamond paste. They also found it hard to believe that a single zircon could have diamonds that ranged in age across more than 1 billion years.This is how science works. The results of an experiment may be published in a peer-reviewed journal, but that is not an endorsement of the experiment's conclusions. Once published, other scientists can read up on the findings of an experiment and attempt to replicate it. If an experiment cannot be replicated by others, it is viewed with skepticism, and the data analyzed more carefully by experts who were not involved in the experiment.
As much glory can be had by convincingly refuting an experiment's results as corroborating them!
Those who believe evolution is a "lie" or climate science is a "religion" have much more than the empirical evidence going against them. They're going against the established way science and scientists work, day by day, century after century. Getting thousands of scientists to conspire to perpetuate a falsehood for years on end for the sinister purpose of, say, advancing atheism (via the "lie" of evolution) or socialism (via the "myth" of global warming) would be as impossible as herding a million cats.
Conspiratorial thinking is not thinking at all, it is an exercise in cherry-picking the data to make it fit a preconceived pattern. It is the true hallmark of a religion, and that is why science is not a religion.
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