Isolation: Most dissidents are not routinely in collegial contact either with professional scientists or with one another. Instead, each typically works alone and approaches others only with what he or she feels are finished theories. The same is true of some small fraction of first-rate scientists, such as P.A.M. Dirac and Julian Schwinger. More often, however, mainstream science occurs in the give and take of a group of colleagues. A major contribution of such a group is to cull out and eliminate unproductive ideas. This is important, because the vast majority of new ideas (I would guess at least 97 percent) prove unproductive. Niels Bohr said that "An expert is [someone] who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field."
Conventionality: Many dissidents are loyal to Newtonian mechanics and other long-accepted theories that the professional scientific community consider to be limited in validity. In ...
