> What were those problems? A big one was the size of stars in the Copernican universe. Copernicus proposed that certain oddities observed in the movements of planets through the constellations were due to the fact that Earth itself was moving. Stars show no such oddities, so Copernicus had to theorise that, rather than being just beyond the planets as astronomers had traditionally supposed, stars were so incredibly distant that Earth’s motion was insignificant by comparison. But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a favourite of the Establishment, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem.

This is a fascinating observation, and given the information they had at the time, I can see where Locher is coming from. Given two possibilities, one involving absolutely enormous stars and one involving a earth that circled the sun, both extraordinary claims, and no sure way (yet) to evaluate which was true, it's human that he supported the more comfortable hypothesis, and he wasn't provably wrong given the information they had.

> That is unfortunate for science, because today the opponents of science make use of that caricature. Those who insist that the Apollo missions were faked, that vaccines are harmful, or even that the world is flat – whose voices are now loud enough for the ‘War on Science’ to be a National Geographic cover story and for the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to address even their most bizarre claims – do not reject the scientific process per se. Rather, they wrap themselves in the mantle of Galileo, standing (supposedly) against a (supposedly) corrupted science produced by the ‘Scientific Establishment’.

The problem with this is that it conflates the public social debate with an internal scientific debate. Galileo vs. Pope Paul V is not the same debate as Galileo vs. Locher. The former is a debate driven by social needs that tries to drive opinion starting from what the pope wanted rather than observation (which is in fact a rejection of scientific process). The latter is two competing scientific hypotheses.

Likewise, picking one of the example debates (do vaccines cause autism?) there are two possible debates. The public debate is driven by social needs--mostly people trying to find meaning in the suffering caused by their child's autism, and people trying to take advantage of that need. This is absolutely a rejection of scientific process: scientific process attempts to explain phenomena, not find explanations that make people feel better. The internal scientific debate is largely not a debate, because the evidence that vaccines don't cause autism is, at this point, so overwhelming.

"Wrapping oneself in the mantle of Galileo" IS inherently an unscientific position: being pro- or anti-establishment is irrelevant to scientific process. The fact that Galileo happened to be anti-establishment at the time is irrelevant to the fact that ultimately his hypotheses were proven correct.

The real problem here is that a large part of the scientific community doesn't recognize that the social debate and the scientific debate are two different debates. Scientific evidence which is persuasive in a scientific context (studies have shown no correlation between vaccines and autism) does not persuade everyone in a public social context. Emotional approaches are also necessary (would you rather your child died of whooping cough? Or as one person with autism said, "It's painful that some people would rather have a dead child than a child like me.").