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Revision as of 21:57, 3 September 2005 by Haiduc (talk | contribs) (early outline)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Science is a domain of knowledge that is controversial by its very nature, in that what is considered to be "established fact," itself a provisional state, is determined through a process of challenge and debate in which one school of thought emerges, for a time, victorious over the others. Such debates are never offically settled with any finality whatsoever, and it is expected that if and when conflicting evidence is discovered and confirmed, the science will be modified to include that discovery. As Sharon Dunwoody writes in Communicating Uncertainty, "all science is inherently uncertain."
Controversial science however has been traditionally used of those ideas and theories which have been advanced by individuals either from outside the field of science which they are addressing and in which they are proposing views at odds with generally agreed-upon findings, or from scientists outside the mainstream of their disciplines. An example of controversial science is the work of Wilhelm Reich a psychiatrist whose controversial work with "orgone," a physical energy he claimed to have discovered, contributed to his alienation from the psychiatric and eventually resulted in his jailing.