DE: >>> Science is a pursuit that requires the opposite of trust: skepticism and testing of what we think we know.
That is a very succinct distillation of the scientific method into a single sentence.
And it is exactly the reason why I want to scream every time I hear the claim: "I follow the science."
I do NOT 'follow the science'. Never have in my career. It put me at odds, several times, with 'geophysical managers' and department heads - sometimes dramatically so. I was literally at the 'bleeding edge' of seismic technolog for a large portion of my time - and with NO PATENTS to my name pioneered several areas that have become standard practice - despite being told by 'PHD's' that they didn't see the value in what I said.
One example was 'horizontal time slices' of 3-D data (called a time slice). I said that a TRUE (also known as RELATIVE) amplitude section had value. My manager didn't see it, but DID allow me time and manpower to write a program (HP 9830 star wars vintage), get printouts of vertical time windows (4 foot piles of printout) that were processed as true-amp sections, and generated the FIRST TRUE AMPLICUDE timeslice in the industry (excluding possible internal unpublicized work at Shell or Exxon). I still have a plot of that section. My manager looked at it, and still said he didn't see the value. It is now an industry standard display, and if I tell someone I 'invented' it - they look at me as if I am crazy. Why nobody could invent it, it is the OBVIOUS only way to properly display the data.
(Up to that time, slices were produced from data that had been HEAVILY equalized in the 'vertical domain' - normally a 60 ms AGC operator, automatic gain control.)
Other times, I damn near got fired by 'defying' the 'conventional methods'. Folks in the Mobil R&D got what I was saying, but others with phd's in the district offices were huge problems. Same issues at Sun Oil. Spatial aliasing recovery, circular seismic shooting program, amplitude corrections for source and receiver data, surface slicing .... blah, blah, blah.
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good ...
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