No one person speaks for all of science. This is why the lay public's reporting of events really bothers me, because it shows a complete lack of understanding of how science works, how important it is to have different models, different viewpoints, different theories, and an open debate to construct credible experiments to verify them or refute them.
What we get as laymen are reports more of the like that one week coffee will add 20 years to your life and the next week that it will kill you. Lather, rinse, repeat.
For laymen who don't know this, they may find it bewildering if not upsetting. But it's all part of the natural course.
The facts are that this guy may be a Nobel laureate in physics, but he was awarded it for tunneling phenomena in solids and, specifically, superconductors. Basically, his work is at a microscopic level. While a scientist needs some baseline level of understanding of the universe, that hardly qualifies him as an expert on macroscopic phenomena. Particularly those that cannot be controlled on a 3x4 lab bench where all his experimentation can normally be self-contained.
That and the guy is 82.
I'm actually only half joking with this. I cannot tell you how many tenured PhD researchers I've met in grad school at places like Berkeley who are lost out on the fringes where the rest of the scientific community give him that "cute, mostly harmless, but irrelevant" smile.
The facts are that Dr. Giaever is a minority opinion on the matter. What concerns me more are people who fit the data to support their hypothesis, and not the other way around. Dr. Giaever has become such a data point himself. A patron saint to believers. Not that you have to dismiss him outright (the healthy dissent thing I opened with). But at this point, he's among the dying breed of minority opinions left on the matter. The tidal wave is against him.
(For the record, citing Fox News doesn't exactly help the credibility of the story here either.)
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