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
It can pogo-stick along at 50-plus miles per hour, leaping 30-odd feet in a single bound. But that platinum-medal athleticism falls by the wayside at a sub-Saharan riverside, the source of life and death for the skittish ...
Evolution
Jan 12, 2023
3
260
Monash University scientists have challenged the conventional wisdom that biological patterns are explained by physical constraints.
Plants & Animals
Aug 19, 2022
7
3173
In a surprising discovery, an international team of researchers, led by scientists in the University of Minnesota Center for Quantum Materials, found that deformations in quantum materials that cause imperfections in the ...
Superconductivity
Oct 4, 2021
0
529
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
Research led by University of Texas at Dallas physicists has altered the understanding of the fundamental properties of perovskite crystals, a class of materials with great potential as solar cells and light emitters.
Condensed Matter
Oct 7, 2019
0
178
If some volcanoes operate on geologic timescales, Costa Rica's Irazú had something of a short fuse. In a new study in the journal Nature, scientists suggest that the 1960s eruption of Costa Rica's largest stratovolcano was ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 31, 2013
0
0
As cicadas on the East Coast begin emerging from their 17-year slumber, a spritz of dew drops is all they need to keep their wings fresh and clean. Researchers at Duke University and James Cook University in Australia have ...
General Physics
Apr 29, 2013
1
1
(PhysOrg.com) -- At the smallest scales, magnetism may not work quite the way scientists expected, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letters by Rafal Oszwaldowski and Igor Zutic of the University at Buffalo and ...
General Physics
Jun 29, 2011
3
0
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