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by ImPostingOnHN
2 days ago
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> well short of a built in civilization level reaction to scientific progress writ large if I remember correctly, the plot point wasn't a "civilization level reaction" to bad particle physics experiment results, but rather a very narrow reaction by less than 1/10,000,000th of civilization. which makes sense: the vast majority of the members of "civilization" could not even accurately define "particle physics", much less understand the field, much less comprehend experimental results, much less understand the correctness of them, much less experience anguish over their correctness. |
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Your memory is exactly right. But in this instance, what I'm reacting to is not the book but to an HN commenter who glibly claimed that "the history of scientific revolutions" demonstrated that scientists would be suicidal in response to negative data, a pretty extreme claim, followed by a different commenter attempting to support this claim with two examples of scientists frustrated by lack of acceptance of their work that did not die by suicide, massively underestimating the kind of data necessary to support the notion that of scientific revolutions demonstrate the self destructiveness of scientists in response to uncooperative data.
But you are right, that's completely unrelated to what happens in the book, which is all the more reason why appealing to it to explain the behavior of scientists in the Three Body is beside the point. The book doesn't even make that argument! You are not asked to believe that there's some baked in tendency of scientists toward self destruction, it's explained an entirely different way: they are subjected to a campaign of sabotage, harassment, and worse.
The whole detour into whether scientists in the usual case would off themselves is a frustrating non sequitur born of short attention spans, that's not even true (and certainly not at such a level of generality that it's a characteristic response to scientific revolutions throughout history) and it's not even applicable to the events in the book.