[WikiEN-l] Protoscience category

[Poor, Edmund W]

Protoscience is anything scientists are still working on, which hasn't
become really established.

The problem is that Science itself has only just begun to tackle the
really difficult problems. In Aristotle's time, they merely thought that
"heavy things fall faster". It wasn't until 1600 or 1620 that it was
definitively proven that heavy, dense objects (think cannonballs!) fall
faster and faster - and that this is NOT related to their weight. That
is, a 10-pound cannonball and a 20-pound cannonball, dropped from a
tower at the same time, will hit the ground at the same time!

It was not until the period 1860 - 1910 (or so) that the Germ Theory of
Disease became well known, and there was considerable resistance among
doctors to even LOOKING at the research results.

Now we have psychology, political science, economics: these fields are
still in their infancy. How can we describe them accurately and without
bias?

And what about climatology? The global warming theory is so
_politically_ controversial (with liberals and conservatives evenly
split on it) that we've been unable to take the NPOV-dispute tag off the
article for the whole 3 years we've been trying to write it. I'm good
friends with William Connolley, but he can't write NPOV for crap (sorry,
Doc!).

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed