Bryan Field-Elliot of NetMeme responds to some bloggery about Stephen Wolfram by pointing us to an article by Michael Shermer (editor of Skeptic) in Scientific American that wonders why Wolfram is getting far more attention than an equally implausible-sounding theory from James Carter.

…[Li]ke it or not, in science, as in most human intellectual endeavors, who is doing the saying matters as much as what is being said, at least in terms of getting an initial hearing.

Science is, in this sense, conservative and sometimes elitist. It has to be in order to survive in a surfeit of would-be revolutionaries. For every Stephen Wolfram there are 100 James Carters. There needs to be some screening process whereby truly revolutionary ideas are weeded out from ersatz ones.

Enter the skeptics. We are interested in the James Carters of the world…

Yet the article has already pointed to the screening method: Feynman called Wolfram “astonishing” and Wolfram was the youngest person ever to win a MacArthur “genius” award, whereas Carter “has beeen an abalone diver, gold miner, filmmaker, cave digger, repairman, inventor and owner-operator of a trailer park.” That doesn’t mean, of course, that his theory of “circlons” is wrong. But the screening process is probably working pretty well: Carter published and no one paid much attention. If you’re going to pay full attention to every publication, you don’t have much of a filtering system.

What Shermer is talking about is probably better called a “second look,” and they’re important, too. (And, inevitably, this discussion should send us scuttling back to Kuhn who shows that “conservativism” in science isn’t a political choice but a requirement for there to be science at all: science can only proceed within a paradigm.)

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