Some of my academic critics have crossed the line by belittling the achievements of Galileo and Newton.
They claim that Galileo did not understand the concept of “friction,” despite the indisputable fact that Galileo abstracted from the effects of friction in order to discover his laws of motion. Furthermore, Galileo made an original discovery about friction. He was the first to realize that bodies falling through a resistive medium reach a terminal speed, and this happens because the frictional force is proportional to speed and therefore this force increases until it equals the weight of the falling body. How could he reach such a generalization without the idea of friction?
The attack on Newton claims that he didn’t understand the concepts of “inertia,” “acceleration,” and “momentum.” Allegedly, he was still in the grip of the medieval concept of “impetus.” In contrast to the medieval thinkers, however, Newton was able to calculate — in one case after another — motions and the effects of such motions. In some of his calculations, he symbolized “acceleration” by a “v” with a dot over it, and the dot indicates a time derivative. If he could symbolize and calculate acceleration, in what sense does he not have the idea?
Such people cannot possibly have studied the mathematics of Galileo and Newton.
As to my personal reaction, I’ll paraphrase Jack Nicholson in the movie A Few Good Men:
“I don’t want money and I don’t want fame. What I do want is for academics to stand there in their girlie graduate gowns and extend to Galileo and Newton some freakin’ respect.”
Now there’s supposedly something called “post-normal science”, which sounds like more of the nonsense described and rebutted in the book Higher Superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science”.
See use of post-normal to justify climate alarmism in the philosophy of science page http://c21.phas.ubc.ca/article/true-false-or-not-sure-philosophy-science-21st-century which refers to S. O. Funtawicz and J. R. Ravetz, “Science for a post-normal age”, Futures 25 (2009) 739-755 for a description of what it is.
(Not covered in the book Higher Superstition, which is several years old. That book is exhaustive but has zingers and many good rebuttal points such as, in my hypothetical words, “If a female scientist discovers a cure for cancer, does [the theory being critiqued] mean it won’t work for males?”)
More than a year later, my reflections on this work – published at length today on my blog – remain a mix of praise and question. Overall, the book is important and valuable, a necessary statement in response (if not defiance) to the large, wide, deep, and broad stream of irrational, unsupported claims from academics, especially in the social sciences. That said, many little improvements would put the polish on this rough gem.