Science versus Academia

[napoleon_in_rags]

13. There is a rift between the two.

For instance, when I was in school, I would cite Wikipedia and old profs would just laugh. Truth be told, Wikipedia has pretty damn good content. However, it used to be professors who were called on for contributions to encyclopedias, which was a source of income and published works (they say its publish or perish for profs) so there was a major push in academia against it, though their complaints were not necessary based on wikipedia's content, they were economic and political. That's an example of academia diverging from "just the facts".

Science is dangerous turf. The value of a prof is what she's put years of work into. For a history prof, what happened isn't suddenly going to change, but for a science prof, a new theory can turn everything on its head, and turn years of study into once valueable knowledge into alchemical esoterica.