Consensus building is a way to approach problems in which mediocrity of outcome is pretty much guaranteed. Anything original is tossed out as too radical. Only ideas that fit a pre-existing notion of how things work are allowed into the consensus. The end result is never anything but an extension of what is already widely believed to be true.
This is as true in science as it is in business and politics. Interesting ideas are almost always peripheral, and they are often radically different from the consensus.
Peer reviews and conferences that aim to build consensus are hindrances to originality. They protect the Status Quo at the expense of diversity. A better way of organizing science would be to encourage the development of many different theories, and to have rivaling factions defend these theories while pointing out weaknesses in other ones.
This would produce a large number of theories on any topic, complete with lists of strengths and weaknesses. Instead of a single unified theory for everything, we get many such theories. Strengths and weakness would be widely known and accepted as such, and there would be a continuous stream of new and original ways of looking at things.
It would no longer be possible to brush aside inconvenient facts as irrelevant. Weaknesses would be highlighted by opponents, and defenders would have to explain discrepancies between theory and observation.
Consensus building and peer reviews have crippled theoretical science to such an extent that hardly anything new has come to the forefront over the last hundred years. Scientific work has been limited to tinkering with existing ideas. Anything else is considered fringe and radical. Originality is labeled pseudo-science with hardly anyone bothering to look beyond the title.
The result of this has been a number of remarkably weak explanations that exist purely because they are considered valid by consensus. As an example, we have the Nice model of solar system evolution, developed in 2005 through general consensus.
This model takes the accretion disk model of solar system formation as a given, and builds on this in order to explain our current solar system. Looking at it superficially, the theory makes sense. The early solar system is conventionally thought to have been teaming with rocks and planets, and something must have cleaned this up to form the solar system as it is today.
The Nice model proposes that big planets tossed out smaller ones. The big ones roamed the solar system until they found their present stable orbits. Using computer models, scientists have worked their way backwards to the hypothetical beginning, and from this they concluded that their model is correct.
However, there is a glaring weakness in this explanation. No less than 99% of all matter thought to have existed in the early solar system has been ejected, leaving us with a mere 1% of the original. That means that almost everything that was created early on has been ejected into space.
If we combine this with the increasingly popular assumption that our solar system is nothing special, we have to suppose that all stars have undergone similar processes in their past, throwing 99% of their original mass into space. Almost all planets ever created are rogue ones. But observation tells us otherwise. Rogue planets are not unheard of, but they're not common either.
Some may argue that debris from the early solar system was tossed out in all directions, and that the vastness of space makes it perfectly possible to have 99% of all planets roaming around without this being noticed. However, galaxies don't have huge clouds of debris around them. Rogue planets must therefore be moving in the plane of the galaxy, and this would make encounters with them common.
It seems to me more likely that solar systems are created stable from the start, and that there never was a violent period of great upheaval some 600 million years ago. The craters on the moon are not ancient scars, but the result of ongoing electrical activity.
This is not to say that nothing upsetting ever happens in our solar system. Something violent appears to have happened a mere 10,000 years ago. But it was nothing like the Nice model suggests, and things returned to stability in decades rather than millennia.
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| Path of rogue planet |
Mainstream astronomy fails to consider electric forces in their analysis of things, and their theories are therefore lacking a powerful mechanism for stability. Things are perpetually unstable, and processes take millions of years to complete. That's in stark contrast to Donald Scott's model where solar systems are created in a matter of days.
But consensus will have it that Donald Scott is a pseudo-scientist and that we must dismiss his simple explanation in favor of an elaborate tale in which gravity first pulls things together into planets, only to throw 99% of everything back into space.
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| The Emperor's New Clothes |
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