Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter
Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it.
Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it.
Quantum Physics
Sep 25, 2013
139
12
Conventional wisdom holds that changing the views of voters on divisive issues is difficult if not impossible—and that when change does occur, it is almost always temporary.
Social Sciences
Dec 11, 2014
304
0
Monash University scientists have challenged the conventional wisdom that biological patterns are explained by physical constraints.
Plants & Animals
Aug 19, 2022
7
3173
Everyone knows the flip of a coin is a 50-50 proposition. Only it's not. You can beat the odds. So says a three-person team of Stanford and UC-Santa Cruz researchers. They produced a provocative study that turns conventional ...
Mathematics
Oct 20, 2009
8
0
Contrary to previous thought, a gigantic planet in wild orbit does not preclude the presence of an Earth-like planet in the same solar system—or life on that planet.
Astronomy
Nov 5, 2019
2
892
The oft-used description of early humans as "hunter-gatherers" should be changed to "gatherer-hunters," at least in the Andes of South America, according to groundbreaking research led by a University of Wyoming archaeologist.
Archaeology
Jan 24, 2024
3
3251
Scientists at Yale and the Southwest Research Institute (SRI) say they've hit the jackpot with some valuable new information about the story of gold.
Earth Sciences
Oct 10, 2023
4
1441
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the ancestors of modern humans diverged from an archaic lineage that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans. Yet the evolutionary relationships between these groups remain unclear.
Archaeology
Aug 7, 2017
0
1367
In conventional wisdom, producing a curved space requires distortions, such as bending or stretching a flat space. A team of researchers at Purdue University have discovered a new method to create curved spaces that also ...
General Physics
Jun 1, 2022
5
711
A new study published in Nature Communications has revealed that the interplay between meandering ocean currents and the ocean floor induces upwelling velocity, transporting warm water to shallower depths. This mechanism ...
Earth Sciences
Apr 11, 2024
0
1664
Conventional wisdom (CW) is a term used to describe ideas or explanations that are generally accepted as true by the public or by experts in a field. The term implies that the ideas or explanations, though widely held, are unexamined and, hence, may be reevaluated upon further examination or as events unfold.
The term is often credited to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who used it in his 1958 book The Affluent Society:
It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.
The term in actuality is much older and dates at least to 1838. "Conventional wisdom" was used in a number of other works prior to Galbraith, occasionally in a positive or neutral sense, but more often pejoratively.
Conventional wisdom is not necessarily true. Conventional wisdom is additionally often seen as an obstacle to introducing new theories, explanations, and so as an obstacle that must be overcome by such revisionism. This is to say, that despite new information to the contrary, conventional wisdom has a property analogous to inertia that opposes the introduction of contrary belief, sometimes to the point of absurd denial of the new information set by persons strongly holding an outdated (conventional wisdom) view. This inertia is due to conventional wisdom being made of ideas that are convenient, appealing and deeply assumed by the public, who hangs on to them even as they grow outdated. The unavoidable outcome is these ideas will eventually not match reality at all, so conventional wisdom will be violently shaken until it doesn't conflict reality so blatantly.
The concept of conventional wisdom also is applied or implied in political senses, often related closely with the phenomenon of talking points. It is used pejoratively to refer to the idea that statements which are repeated over and over become conventional wisdom regardless of whether or not they are true.
In a more general sense, it is used to refer to the accepted truth about something which nearly no-one would argue about, and so is used as a gauge (or well-spring) of normative behavior or belief, even within a professional context. One such example was conventional wisdom in 1960, even among most doctors, dictated that smoking was not particularly harmful to one's health.[citation needed] Another: It might be used in this manner discussing a technical matter such as the conventional wisdom was that a man would suffer fatal injuries if he experienced more than eighteen g-forces in an aerospace vehicle. (John Stapp shattered that myth by repeatedly withstanding far more in his research—peaking above 46 Gs).
Conventional wisdom may itself be the subject of legends. For example, it is widely believed that conventional wisdom prior to Christopher Columbus held that the world was flat, when in actuality scholars had long accepted that the earth is a sphere.
When conventional wisdoms are overthrown, outranked, or outflanked by new ideas, and the new conventional wisdom becomes established in place of the previous one, there may yet be considerable remaining affiliation to the previous regime.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA