Scepticism

Despite the attractions of economic forces driving environmental protection, some cautions and failures have been noted. Firstly, the export of hazardous waste to countries where costs for treatment are lower enhances environmental risks during transport and has the potential for transboundary export in the event of pollution. At the same time, the loss of raw material may deprive the home market of an adequate supply of feedstock for the home-based industry. Secondly, there is considerable scepticism that self-regulation of TBT-based antifoulants could be achieved in a timely manner by the shipping industry. This is an instance where the cost benehts to one industry are born by another commercial sector, notably aquaculture. Thus, protection of the marine environment is likely to be aided by economic factors but the role of government, via taxation and standard setting, is not likely to be usurped. Public education and, in turn, pressure, can promote and support corporate environmentalism. 

Arrhenius, insofar as his profession could be defined at all, began as a physicist. He worked with a physics professor in Stockholm and presented a thesis on the electrical conductivities of aqueous solutions of salts. A recent biography (Crawford 1996) presents in detail the humiliating treatment of Arrhenius by his sceptical examiners in 1884, which nearly put an end to his scientific career he was not adjudged fit for a university career. He was not the last innovator to have trouble with examiners. Yet, a bare 19 years later, in 1903, he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. It shows the unusual attitude of this founder of physical chemistry that he was distinctly surprised not to receive the Physics Prize, because he thought of himself as a physicist. 

During the early years of physieal ehemistry, Ostwald did not believe in the existence of atoms... and yet he was somehow ineluded in the wild army of ionists. He was resolute in his scepticism and in the 1890s he sustained an obscure theory of energetics to take the place of the atomic hypothesis. How ions could be formed in a solution containing no atoms was not altogether clear. Finally, in 1905, when Einstein had shown in rigorous detail how the Brownian motion studied by Perrin could be interpreted in terms of the collision of dust motes with moving molecules (Chapter 3, Section 3.1.1), Ostwald relented and publicly embraced the existence of atoms. 

The detailed reasons for Ostwald s atomic scepticism when he gave a major lecture in Germany in 1895 are set out systematically in a book by Stehle (1994), who... 

In Section 3.2.3.2, the reader was introduced to dislocations (and to that 1934 paper by Geoffrey Taylor) and an account was also presented of how the sceptical response to these entities was gradually overcome by visual proofs of various kinds. However, by the time, in the late 1950s, that metallurgists and physicists alike had been won over by the principle seeing is believing , another sea-change had already taken place. 

Recently, Langer (1999) has joined the debate. He at first sounds a distinct note of scepticism ... the term numerical simulation makes many of us uncomfortable. It is easy to build models on computers and watch what they do, but it is often unjustified to claim that we learn anything from such exercises. He continues by examining a number of actual simulations and points out, first, the value of... 

As we have repeatedly seen in this chapter, proponents of computer simulation in materials science had a good deal of scepticism to overcome, from physicists in particular, in the early days. A striking example of sustained scepticism overcome, at length, by a resolute champion is to be found in the history of CALPHAD, an acronym denoting CALculation of PHAse Diagrams. The decisive champion was an American metallurgist, Larry Kaufman. 

Prior to 1965, all we had in our armoury were the a and it Hiickel theories, and a very small number of rigorous calculations designated ab initio (to be discussed later). The aims of quantum chemistry in those days were to give total energies and charge distributions for real molecules, and the seventh decimal place in the calculated properties of LiH. Practical chemists wanted things like reliable enthalpy changes for reactions, reaction paths, and so on. It should come as no surprise to learn that the practical chemists therefore treated theoreticians with scepticism. 

In 1820 Hans Christian Oersted discovered electromagnetism. A report of Oersted s work was delivered before a sceptical meeting of the Academic dcs Sciences held on September 4, 1820. Oersted s work was contrary to established ideas, based on Coulomb s work of the 1780s, that there could not be any interaction between electricity and magnetism. Ampere however, immediately accepted Oersted s discovery, and set to work, reading his first paper on the subject to the Academie on September 18, 1820. 

The sceptical chemist draws conclusions regarding chemical materials chiefly on the basis of quantitative chemical analysis which is the touchstone of all chemical hypothesis. 

By the middle of the nineteenth century more than 60 elements were known with new ones continuing to be discovered. For each of these elements, chemists attempted to determine its atomic weight, density, specific heat, and other properties. The result was a collection of facts, which lacked rational order, Mendeleev noticed that if the elements were arranged by their atomic weights, then valencies and other properties tended to recur periodically. However, there were gaps in the pattern and in a paper of 1871 Mendeleev asserted that these corresponded to elements that existed but had not yet been discovered. He named three of these elements eka-aluminium, eka-boron and eka-silicon and gave detailed descriptions of their properties. The reaction of the scientific world was sceptical. But then in 1874 Lecoq de Boisbaudran found an... 

Of course, a defender of this account might react to these points by simply repositioning stage two at 1869, After all, Lipton himself makes no particular claim about Mendeleev s 1871 paper being the one that turned the tide. But then it is difficult to identify a stage one Mendeleev s paper of 1869 contains his first ever published periodic table and hence the first candidate for mild scepticism . 

No one could deny, of course, that it is one thing for a theory to make predictions of the existence of hitherto unknown elements and quite another for it to make successful, empirically verified predictions. But neither Maher nor Lipton—nor, so far as we can see, anyone else—cites any substantial evidence for the sceptical attitude of Mendeleev s fellow scientists in 1869 or 1871 and the only evidence they cite for the increased confidence in the theory as a result of the successful predictions is the award to Mendeleev of the Davy Medal in 1882-— and this, as we show in the next sub-section, turns out to be (worse than) unconvincing. 

Of course there were some scientists who were sceptical of the value of Mendeleev s classification in 1869/1871 (and indeed some who remained sceptical after the new elements began to be discovered). However, at least two historical facts seem to us to speak unambiguously against any general scepticism about the value... 

The answer is patently no —not because of any general sceptical-philosophical scruples about induction, but because of the particular fact that the impression of consistent predictive success for Mendeleev s scheme is a complete misrepresentation of history a classic example of an effect (Mendeleev s predictive success ) created by selection-bias. Mendeleev made any number of predictions on the basis of his scheme (or rather schemes—there are at least 65 versions of Mendeleev s table, published and unpublished). Many of these predictions (depending on how exactly they are individuated)—perhaps a majority—were unsuccessful. 

Remember that, on Maher s view, the successful prediction of two new elements counted for more than the prior successful accommodation of the then known sixty-two elements—because the two successes dispelled the scepticism that had existed despite the sixty-two successful accommodations.) Since we shall again need to... 

But, thirdly, and contrary both to Maher and Tipton s story of scepticism giving way to general credence and to Brush s more sophisticated account, the real story of the reception of Mendeleev s ideas was a complicated affair with at least the following aspects ... 

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