Leaderboard

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories “in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products…manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.” The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board—which funded the creation of numerous public schools—issued a statement which read in part:

Not very in some cases. Dark matter and dark energy for example are artifacts of a model that didn't match reality so they invented them rather than discarding the model, that's really the only 'evidence' that they are actually a real thing. Also the big bang is bollocks in my opinion. When it was found that redshift is proportional to distance that should have been taken as evidence that the redshift must be occurring during the light's journey rather than being caused by motion of the source away from us. When redshift was shown to be higher than what you'd get if distant gala

Good, and I must say I appreciate that attitude. That isn’t my experience, and I work directly with many scientists, often for months at a time, usually at sea. In my experience, all good scientists are skeptics and only feel confident about their understanding when there is a preponderance of evidence supporting their position. There may very well be still unresolved issues and loose ends; in fact, there are usually many, but as long as there is a preponderance of carefully examined and empirically tested evidence, scientists can feel confident they are at least on the right tr