A while back, Leo Minnigh wrote:
> I know of another example. During the fifties and early sixties, their was
> a Dutch man called Klaas Dijkstra, who claimed that the Earth was flat.
> That is stage 2: speculation. He then tries to find proofs for this
> theory. And he hesitated not to start discussions with scientists. Most of
> these professionals made a fool of him. But I liked him, because he opened
> my eyes, although his scientific thinking order was questionable. Why did
> I liked him? It is because he denied completely the filtering and
> pre-judging; he questioned the 'obvious' and demonstrated that the
> 'proofs' we learned at school for a round Earth were false (or at least
> questionable too); he opened eyes to observe again (with other eyes) what
> was already observed; he used data which were overseen or neglected.
This reminds me of another curious fellow, the American Charles Fort
(although of Dutch heritage -- a pattern?). While he had wild notions of
his own, he's best known for puncturing the pomposity of many scientists
and collecting hard-to-explain phenomena, including UFO sightings, rains
of frogs and periwinkles, etc. A good introduction is at
http://ufos.about.com/culture/ufos/library/weekly/aa091399.htm?iam=mt
[Host's Note: Hmm... Flat earth. UFOs. Raining frogs... And, what's a
periwinkle? If we go much further with this, I would like to connect it to
org learning. I'm tempted to think the connection is "scientists reject
things that don't fit their paradigm and thus can miss phenomena that
could extend their theories." All of us do this, and in my opinion, all of
us adopt beliefs on insubstantial data. What else do we want to say about
this? What does it tell us about being effective in the world? ..Rick]
--Don Dwiggins "If you judge, investigate." SEI Information Technology -- Seneca d.l.dwiggins@computer.org
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>