MNb wrote on 08/25/10 at 07:20:24:
 Quote:Prediction: Einstein's "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" will be regarded as the the most egregious act of plagiarism in any peer-reviewed journal of any paper in any branch of science in the 20th century. 
 Sloughter is right. This prediction will come true within 10 billion years or so. 
   The degree of reductionism in science may cause some scientists to think that they are insulated from scrutiny outside their discipline. When it becomes known in the scientific community that the lowest quality of science ever done, the aftermath of the Eclipse Data from 1919, was directly responsible for steering science, the scientific method, society and history down a wrong path, people are going to wonder in the scientific community, "Can we trust physicists to police their own discipline, particularly when massive funding is attendant to that discipline?"  
Einstein is like a bull elephant in his prime; his reputation seems unassailable, but chinks are beginning to appear. The repudiation of space/time (actually space/light velocity) is going to cause scientists outside of physics to wonder, "What others of his theories are in question?"  
We now see in society the rise in prominence of "players", people who are adept at manipulating other people. Einstein was a past master at this. As I have said before, Einstein could win the Survivors Series by convincing the other players not to show up because obviously they would lose.  
People don't want players in science. When it becomes clear to the American publich and outside America, that scientists are just as slimey as the typical used car salesman, people are going to wonder if the science being done is reflective of a much deeper problem---why America is falling by the wayside in science and mathematics.  
When 60 Minutes devotes a major part of its show to vindicating Martin Fleischmann for his work in cold fusion and a diehard cynic became a believer after reviewing his findings from Energetics out of Israel, Americans are going to ask themselves, "Can we trust physicists to tell the truth?" They need only look in detail how MIT scientists corrupted the scientific method just to shut down cold fusion funding by DOE.  
It doesn't take a genius to realize that if you throw out 85% of the data as has been done by and endorsed by experts to know that the results are meaningless.  
General relativity became a "Strong Model" overnight to the exclusion of other models. As I have said in other published articles, "Strong models are like crude filters, readily admitting data consistent with the model and excluding data inconsistent with the model". This statement was from Graf, but I can't find a reference so I didn't credit it to him in my paper. Gasp! Plagiarism!  
I also averred that Strong Models are like queen bees. The first thing a queen bee does when she realizes she is a queen is to kill off any potential rivals. That is how strong models work. We can only speculate what would have happened if Eddington had told the truth i.e. there would have been no way for the expedition to Principe or Sobral to say anything about general relativity, because neither the equipment, recording devices (the photographic plates) or the physical conditions, the eclipse shadow, allowed for any attempt to determine the deflection of starlight.  
This fraudulent data set dictated the path of physics for several generations. As Ian McCausland has indicated, without the Eclipse of 1919, general relativity would have had to compete with other models and might not have fared quite so well if the deck hadn't been stacked in its favor by the Eclipse data.  
Calling Einstein the top scientist in physics is going to be compared to being the top used car salesman.