Hacker News Reader

Of course there was scientific opposition to Galileo. Scientific ideas get hammered out through debate and disagreement. New ideas in science often take decades or even centuries to fully develop and reach broad acceptance.

That is why it is important that new ideas can be discussed freely, which wasn't the case in Galileo's time.

View on HN

They are now, but the uninformed reader can't assume that that's static throughout history. There will have been some point where that became fully true, some point where it wasn't, and some continuous function of time defining the extent to which that's true in between. Can you define any of the latter two things on the list?

> They are now, but the uninformed reader can't assume that that's static throughout history.

Scientific ideas are not discussed freely. They are driven by funding, which is disproportionally awarded to novel results. Non-novel results or failures to reproduce are overly ignored and under-funded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com