Wallace Thornhill
15th December, 2014
Congratulations to the team responsible for the success of the Rosetta mission to comet 67 P Churyumov-Gerasimenko (henceforth 67 P). However, it’s a shame that scientists misled the engineers with their cherished story of icy comets, which resulted in an inappropriate design for the lander, Philae. Chris Reeve writes, “We train all physicists to adopt the same basic scientific framework — at the expense of also teaching them how to analyze the same phenomenon from multiple perspectives — and then we wonder why certain problems remain unresolved despite the investment of massive resources, people and time. The very act of rigidly training everybody in the same framework seems to me the problem which precludes their solution.”
In These New Times 