At http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/05/scientific-elitism-is-fundamentall… … we have lots of evidence of this with some of the government chief scientists of recent years over here in the UK. Scientists doomsaying on global warming, a discipline they know very little about. They might be proficient in their own fields but are all at sea outside their own bubble.
In this particular post Dr Tim Ball has taken a real battering – by people thinking he has said something he didn't. He used Velikovsky as an illustration of how science elites attack unwarranted theories. The follow up post illustrates how the elites and their advocates circle the wagons and we are then led to believe all those comments in the first post are now somehow irrelevant (go to http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/08/a-response-to-being-mann-handled/ … ). Funny how these things sea saw one way to the other. Basically, it all started from a little mischief by a climate scientist who seized on a mention of Velikovsky and accused Watts and Ball of being Velikovskian. Apparently, Velikovsky is still perceived as the arch villain of pseudo science and an absolute 'keep away from this guy, he is a crackpot' figure in mainstream. This goes back to the furore he caused in the 1950s and 1960s – when most of the commenters were in school uniform or not yet born. It is highly unlikely many of these people have read anything of Velikovsky. They probably know about him from Wikipedia or some source such as Plait – but Leroy is currently boring everyone to tears by recycling his Talk Origins mouth full. Tim Ball, on the other hand, is just of the age to have lived through the controversy – so he saw Velikovsky as a good example of how elite science tends to gang up on theories they actively dislike and refuse to swallow. He compares it to modern climate science – which is not very kind to Velikovsky. If you go on to PhysOrg and read abstracts of some of the papers being published in elite journals on climate and the way it is going to impact on humans you will be amazed. A surprising amount of the headlines involved is absolute walter mitty stuff. Well, that's life I suppose. If you are toeing the mainstream line you can say almost anything but if you are opposing mainstream you are demonised as a crank – and Velikovsky has become the arch-crank (but only in the eyes of the elite).