(continuation)
 
Moving on to another issue, you cited what I had said, then classified
it in a way that I would not agree with, then mounted a very strong and
persuasive attack against it on the basis of that misclassification.
The question is, what motivated you to do that?  I can tell you that I
was not at all offended by it, perhaps because it was so predictable,
but I think most people would be.  Do you really want to engage in a
constructive and mutually enlightening dialogue?  You have repeatedly
said that you do.  I restate what I said before.  You can answer these
questions by examining your own motivations.  I will not presume to
answer them for you.
 
My final point is rather incidental.  When Galileo invented the
telescope, the professional astronomers of the academic community
refused to look through it, claiming that it was a trick.  When did the
truth change?
 
Isaac Newton, in his experiments on the refraction of light, largely
because of the force of his intellect, ignored evidence, which he almost
certainly saw, that light was not a particle, but was actually a wave.
His ideas, arguably the greatest scientific oeuvre of any man in
history, remained undisputed for centuries.  Were they true or false?
 
When the ideas finally fell, within a relatively short period of time,
it became clear that there was not one view, but two.  Interestingly
enough, if one was true, the other was false, and visa versa.  Both of
these ideas were equally useful, even though they were mutually
exclusive.  Were they both true?
 
Most recently in high energy physics, people invented a the a model of
atomic particles, that was consistent with known observations, but
seemed almost absurd.  However, it was intellectually useful.  Over
time, they began to establish, by bits and pieces that it predicted the
existence of things that had never been seen before, and one by one,
they found their missing Quarks.  When was the model true and when was
it false?
 
Many years ago, a group of students at the Ecole Polytechnic, became
bored with the pedagogy.  They started a journal, called the "Seminare
Burbaki," named after a quixotic French general who, after failing
miserably in battle, put a gun to his head, fired, and missed.  In a
unique style, they began lampooning some of the known pedagogy of
mathematics.  One of them, signing himself "Student" wrote a series of
articles espousing a system of statistics, known to be false, that for
various reasons, was extremely useful in its ability to do statistical
predictions.  The system is a vital tool in the inventory of statistical
tools used in science today.  Is this mathematical system true or false?
 
Jim