<HTML>I believe that the two positions outlined by both of you represent a false dichotomy.
Once upon a time, there was a man name Percival Lowel. Lowel looked through his telescope and saw AMAZING things! An entire civilization on the surface of mars. A civilization of increadible technical achievment - having terraformed the entire surface of the planet with contentntal canal systems.
Of course, today we know that Lowel was wrong. Very wrong. In fact, the conclusions he came to were based upon very little (if any) evidence. Yet his "dream" feuled the imaginations of an entire generation of scientists who would come after him and search for his martians. Today, those scientists celibrate Lowel's unfounded dreams by naming entire observatories after him.
Was Lowel a pseudo-scientist? Was Lowel an advocate of a new "dark age" of mysticism? No.
Lowel was a scientist - but of a kind we rarely see today (and least of all in Archeology). He was what I would term a "speculative scientist." He focused on the possibilities that the accumulated data allowed for, rather than the knowns that that the data indicated were likely. He wasn't afraid to dream of what "might be" - so long as it could be reconciled with the information that was.
I believe we need both kinds of minds in scientific pursuit. While it is true that a world of Lowel's would achieve very little in terms of trustworthy conclusions, a world without any such dreamers is one where scientific pursuit becomes dry, empty, and dispationate.
Today, Mars has a new Percival Lowel. RICHARD C. HOAGLAND has replaced the "canals" of a living civilization with a "face" and "monuments" of a dead civilization. The odds that Hoagland's vision will be borne out by the facts are no greater than those that greeted Lowel's vision, but the *possibility* that it *might* be true again fires the popular imagination - and an entirly new generation of children and young adults dream of the *passion* of scientific inquiry as the public at large watches each new development in the dry cold process of Mars research -- out of curiosity that something truly astounding might be uncovered.
Every scientific dicipline needs its visionaries - to give it direction - to fire the imagination - to ignite the passions. But this is not to say that this kind of science ought to be the dominant mode. Not at all. And there is little danger of it (mind's like Lowel's are rare and beautiful things).
But when a mind such as his comes along, should the establishment fail to find it a place within the process of inquiry - it risks alienating the public and losing all popular interest, for it will always be the Lowel's of this world that humanity will love most - and it is right that this is so.
Even the most jaded astronomer may on some dark evening recall that it was a vision such as Lowel's that sparked his childhood interest in the process of scientific inquiry. A spark that had the surprising power to guide his entire life's journey.
ISHMAEL</HTML>
