> Monday morning I was in the library. The moment of truth. By afternoon it was clear. For whatever reasons, there was nothing in the abstracted literature about succeeding or failing to amplify DNA by the repeated reciprocal extension of two primers hybridized to the separate strands of a particular DNA sequence. By the end of the week I had talked to enough molecular biologists to know that I wasn’t missing anything really obvious. No one could recall such a process ever being tried.
> However, shocking to me, not one of my friends or colleagues would get excited over the potential for such a process. True. I was always having wild ideas, and this one maybe looked no different than last week’s. But it WAS different. There was not a single unknown in the scheme. Every step involved had been done already. Everyone agreed that you could extend a primer on a DNA template, everyone knew you could melt double stranded DNA. Everyone agreed that what you could do once, you could do again.
There's lots of things that sound good on paper. People have been working on things like fusion energy for decades. Actually demonstrating a breakthrough is very different.
That people were unimpressed until the point of demonstration is just rational. If someone were excited and impressed by every promising-sounding hypothetical they would end up on a lot of wild goose chases.
I don't think any of this shows any deficiency in the scientific community. Quite the opposite. A strange guy with off-beat ideas was able to come in and demonstrate an achievement, and he was awarded recognition for it and his technology adopted on a widespread basis.
You lack good reading in history. If everyone thought like you, science would stagnate. You make the common error: to see all “on-paper,” unproven ideas as equal. Comparing the reaction mechanism of PCR to the equations involved in human-scale fusion. They aren’t the same, no two hypotheses are the same. Real scientists actually read hypotheses and try to understand what’s going on in this hypothetical scenario — reason about it. People that do this are often excited about “wild goose chases” because they aren’t actually wild goose chases. They are hypotheses that contain pieces that work with a lower level of ambiguity than most ideas. And here’s another detail the phonies gloss over: sometimes the pieces are better than other times. Most times there’s some ambiguity but sometimes there’s very little and you can be more sure. That was the case with PCR. That’s how real scientists think. They think with models, trying to understand the world. Most people don’t do it and they are utterly unmoved by convincing ideas. They can’t distinguish between convincing ideas and rubbish. It’s the hallmark of someone who doesn’t get it.
