An Excellent Article.

There was a time when I was fascinated by Science. First by the wealth of "facts" that it could give me. I loved the trivia. Then, as an undergraduate and research assitant, I was fascinated by the process of science.

Now, I don't have much time to read about scientific methods. I read about new technology. But I came across this article by the late Michael Crichton (died election day, so you might not have heard). It is facially about Global Warming, but substantivly about the political process, society, and the erroding integrity of science. Long, but well worth it if you have a few minutes to think.

If you didn't know, Crichton was an M.D. in addition to being a fun author. 

Here is a snippit: 

"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. 

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."