“The attitude was Apollo solved most of these questions and now it’s time to invest in other planetary bodies,” said Chip Shearer, a senior research scientist at the University of New Mexico. “But in science, things aren’t stagnant, and we’re always looking for how to improve a model based on new observations and when to throw one model out because it doesn’t explain enough.”
From an article in today’s Boston Globe.
I’m waiting for the op-eds slamming government funding of the space program (what’s left of it anyway) for supporting “research that is amenable to statistical analyses and models even though everyone knows the clean equations mask messy realities that contrived data sets and assumptions don’t, and can’t, capture.”