> so what does informed discussion
> look like truly among people of science?

I'll make a stab, as I have some waiting to do, and WiFi allows me to
include some links.

I've said this more than once - real science is a full-body contact sport.
The proceedings here on Bee-L are far more tame, both from the amount and
complexity of the technotrivia slung around, and from the often-strained
"enforced civility" standpoint.  
As far as "informed" goes, the various physics listservs and
preprint-trafficking dens, where new stuff is discussed among
invitation-only members, so we keep our bickering among ourselves. Everyone
signs the broadest NDA you will ever see on this planet, so everyone is
subjected to "good-natured ribbing", but in the safety of a private
playground. Sometimes, the ribbing goes too far, and cuts into the vital
organs, even among friends.

> what did the discussions of say Newton, Franklin, Bell, tesla, 
> and many more engineers and scientist and innovators look like?
> I wonder how many turned into rude and make even physical 
> fighting or debating across the pub table etc?

To summarize, the only reason that disagreements between "esteemed  men of
science" have not been dramatized and televised as knock-down, drag-out,
no-holds-barred fights suitable for airing on "WWE Smackdown" is that there
is no "Scientific Wrestling Federation" to keep score and track rankings of
the combatants, as there are just too many bouts and wrestlers to count.

Just the first fellow you mentioned was a classic example - Newton's first
paper (white light is composed of all the colors; each monochromatic light
can be separated with a prism) was met with outright bullying from the
esteemed members of the Royal Society.  He survived, writing “I was so
persecuted with discussions arising from the publication of my theory of
light that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so substantial a
blessing.”   Wow.  A "blessing" upon the Royal Society, or upon civilization
itself?  Just a bit arrogant...

The Newton/Leibniz letters and arguments are epic - both seem to have
independently "invented" calculus, and both wanted credit for it.  (In fact,
neither invented it, calculus was always there, waiting to be discovered.
Both classical mechanics and electromagnetism have basic concepts that can
be best expressed only with calculus, so calculus easily describes large
swaths of reality and is a part of reality itself, much like logarithms.
"Calculus" is Latin for a pebble used for counting, proving that the only
trick is to bang the rocks TOGETHER.)

The arguments and letters have been published in several book-length
treatments, but I can remember off the top of my head several highlights -
Leibniz's letter to Princess Caroline (Caroline of Ansbach, of Britain), who
he tutored, stated that Newton's works had contributed to a decline of
"natural religion" (where religion is defended/justified solely from reason
and the study of nature) in England.  Other serious put-downs from Leibniz
included "gravity is a scholastic occult quality", "vacuum is only a
pleasing imagination" and so on.  Rough stuff for the time. Fightin' words,
and this was a time of dueling ("I choose swords!" "Very well, your opponent
gets the pistols!").

Leibniz wrote a review of Newton's treatises, saying: “Accordingly, instead
of the Leibnizian differences, Mr. Newton employs, and has always employed,
fluxions, .... He has made elegant use of these both in his Principia
Mathematica and in other publications since, just as Honore Fabri in his
Synopsis Geometrica substituted the advance of movements for the method of
Cavalieri.” (Cavalieri's methods were "borrowed" by Fabri, and slightly
changed, so this was an open accusation of plagiarism.)

Newton was basically a coward, and had his students defame Leibniz on his
behalf, but they go their licks in.

The facts are that Leibniz published his method in book form and got
credited for it years before Newton published anything on "fluxions", and
Leibniz's private papers show his development of the ideas of calculus in a
starkly different approach from Newton's, but there are others who have
evidence that Leibniz saw Newton's limited-distribution earlier treatises
prior to 1675 or at least 1677, specifically drafts of Newton's "De Analysi
per Equationes Numero Terminorum Infinitas".  The smart money would be on
"independent development", not "plagiarism".

Leibniz died in 1716, and death has a way of at least slowing down
arguments. But others continued to bicker over this point, some to this day.
Note that Leibniz's notation is used by everyone, but Newton is now
considered the "Inventor", because Newton had years after Leibniz's death to
promote his side of the debate.

Newton also had a long and deeply personal series of disputes with Robert
Hooke - They disagreed over the particle/wave duality of light, and it got
very nasty.  Again, both can be considered "right", as this question is a
tricky one, requiring the fabrication of equipment neither could ever
imagine.  Hooke was the ultimate loser here, mostly by dying 24 years before
Newton, and while Hooke was the Royal Society's "Curator of Experiments",
Newton was made the Society's President the year Hooke died.  Newton
grudgingly admitted that Hooke was one of several forerunners in his work on
gravitation, but used his position to trivialize Hooke.  Even Hooke's
official portrait conveniently "disappeared" under Newton's administration.

One interesting thing is that the famous statement "If I have seen further,
it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - was the mother of all
sarcastic insults lobbed at Robert Hooke. This was NOT an expression of
scientific humility on Newton's part, it was in a 1676 letter to Hooke,
arguing over proper credit for a finding in optics. Hooke was short and
hunchbacked, and Newton's specific mention of "giants" was his way of saying
Hooke had no influence at all on his work.
 
Hooke was not shrinking violet himself, he had a fight over who "invented"
the watchspring first with Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens.

In more modern times, we have John Moffat and João Magueijo.
They each proposed a "solution" to multiple messy, unresolved issues, and
got handed their heads for their trouble.
To start, note that "Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth". Physics that turns
out to be correct tends to be "elegant" and "pretty", so something that is
messy and complex tends to be eventually replaced with something far less
messy.  

Second, note that the universe is "too big" - it could not have reached its
current size at the rate of expansion we see now. Instead, everyone stammers
that it must have grown by many orders of magnitude in a fraction of a
second after the Big Bang, in "inflation".  The problem with "inflation" is
that it forces us to have an additional theory to explain why/how/when/where
it occurs.  THAT'S UGLY!  It's also such a basic thing, it's freakin'
embarrassing to not have a better answer.

Moffat (in 1992) and Magueijo (in 1998) merely suggested that maybe light
traveled much faster under the conditions of the Big Bang than it does now.
In other words, "maybe the speed of light is variable, not always 186,000
miles per second".  The reaction to both of them was singularly among the
most raucous, childish, and personal attacks I've ever seen, and I collect
scientific grudge matches the way that you might have collected baseball
cards when you were a kid.  The problem was, E=mc^2 is among the "prettier"
of equations on the shelf, and it has withstood everything thrown at it so
far, so claiming that "c" could be a variable rather than a rock-solid
fundamental constant was not received well.

But wait, there's more!  Nikodem ("Nick") Poplawski at Indiana U dove in
where angels fear to tread, and published this 2010 paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587
which he summarized with the breathtaking phrase “Accordingly, our own
Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe."
That paper has earned him more personal attacks than the Pittsburgh 2009
multi-cop-killer who shared his surname.  But damn if his idea don't have
some serious traction in terms of simplifying the messy "complifications"
out there:

General relativity does not account for the intrinsic momentum of "spin
half" particles. A special version of the theory, called the
"Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity" does.  That theory says
that half integer spin particles should interact, generating a very small
repulsive force called "torsion". Under normal conditions, torsion is too
small to have an effect. But when densities become far  higher than those in
"normal" nuclear matter, it becomes very significant.

Nick thinks that torsion caused all that rapid inflation of the universe.
He makes all kinds of sense here, and several sanity checks have been done
on the math, and they all "confirm" rather than "question" Nick's claims.
So, torsion prevents the formation of a singularity in a black hole (as The
Offspring sang - "Ya gotta keep 'em separated") but allows an immense energy
density to accumulate, which leads to the creation of massive numbers of
particles (via "pair production"), and the expansion of the new universe.

This neatly explains the universe as we see it today, using a single theory
of gravity, and without any handwaving about "inflation".
I cannot express how amazingly beautiful, neat, tidy, and elegant this is,
as compared to the fetid swamp of complexity it replaces.

But Nick's not done there!  His approach ALSO explains why time seems to
flow only in one direction, even though "it shouldn't" - all of physics as
we know and love her is "time symmetric".  If he is correct, the origin of
"the arrow of time" comes from the asymmetry of the flow of matter into the
black hole from the mother universe. “The arrow of cosmic time of a universe
inside a black hole would then be fixed by the time-asymmetric collapse of
matter through the event horizon.”  

You'd think people would throw the man a party, but assertions like this one
tend to "pull the rug out from under" reputations, careers, existing funded
research, and so, many oxen are gored, and multiple vested interests tend to
react badly.  I think it is the best work done in our lifetime on explaining
how things REALLY work.

"But things in beekeeping and entomology would never get THAT bad", you say.

Sorry, I have three names for you - Bill Wilson, Adrian Wenner, and Jonathan
Lundgren.

1) Bill Wilson's tale of woe and intrigue has been mentioned by both myself
and by E. T. Ash in Bee-L postings, so you can do an archive search for our
respective summaries of how badly Bill was treated.  This has no Bee-L
involvement, and we have no pithy statements to quote, but we could likely
find some with a FOIA demand for USDA internal memos.

Bill Wilson of the USDA tracked an earlier 1970s outbreak of "disappearing
disease" to the door of the USDA Baton Rouge Bee Lab, where AHB genetics had
been crossed with the hybrids of the time.  Prototype queens had been
distributed to operations all over, and Bill saw the connection between the
new queens and the problem.  The USDA was embarrassed by the exposure of
their own messing around with "killer bees", and rather than face the music,
they sidetracked him and his career in retaliation for exposing the USDA as
the source of the genetic problem.

The one thing we can quote seems to be an attempt at misdirection:
"The primary cause of the failure of colonies to build up in the apiaries
from which the 1977 HRDD stock came seems to be disease... From our data we
can offer no support for the genetic hypothesis of DD." (From "Disappearing
Disease: III. A comparison of seven different stocks of the honey bee" by
Kulincevic, Rothenbuhler, and Rinderer, June 1984)

2) Adrian Wenner thought that his evidence had refuted that the "honey bee
dance language" communicates distance/direction vectors to forage sources.
For this, he has been absolutely pummeled by many big-names in beekeeping,
and I myself sparred with both him and his self-appointed disciple, Ms. Ruth
Rosin here on Bee-L more than once.  "I tried to conduct myself without
insulting the man or his work, as I strive to "play fair". 

But when the LA Times writes an article about a legitimate university
researcher like Dr. Wenner, and entitles the piece "Lord of the Gadflies",
that's gotta hurt.

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-11-05/news/vw-842_1_adrian-wenner
http://tinyurl.com/qgykqhf

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-11-05/news/vw-842_1_adrian-wenner/2
http://tinyurl.com/oe5p6gv

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-11-05/news/vw-842_1_adrian-wenner/3
http://tinyurl.com/pkzh3mg

(Individual links to each of the 2 pages, as I could not make the "next
page" links work.)

...and people who would usually be described as "colleagues" are far
less-than collegial. Quoting the article:

Tom Seeley is a man who is so nice to even the stupidest questions he is
asked, he seems to be in the running to replace Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers
Neighborhood.  The article quotes him saying of Adrian "If a chapter in his
book were a term paper by an undergraduate, I might give him a C. In that
range."  And also "he'll draw inaccurate conclusions from his results."

Fred Dyer, professor of zoology at MSU: "He really is putting a distorted
spin on the evidence. . . . It's just outright deception. It's not good
history and it's not good science."

Mark Winston, now retired from Simon Fraser U: "The one thing not to lose
sight of in the whole Adrian Wenner story is that Adrian is wrong."

Scientific American magazine called Wenner a "maverick" and a
"gadfly"--curse words in the lexicon of that publication.

3) Jonathan Lundgren's tale can be read at the link below, and in other
media echoes of the same news:
http://harvestpublicmedia.org/article/usda-whistleblower-claims-censorship-p
esticide-research
http://tinyurl.com/nbwxrcw
 
It is not yet clear what, if anything, will be said to attempt to discredit
him, aside from accusing him of minor bureaucratic failings, like not
getting expense reports pre-approved or something.  But stay tuned!

I did not include Cynthia Scott-Dupree of U Guelph or Jerry Bromenshenk (who
has contributed to Bee-L for a while) in the list.  These researchers still
enjoy the respect of the peers, but they were both pilloried in the "media"
by people with "environmentalist agendas".   The only problem is that the
"Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" is a universal cognitive fault we all
have, and there is only so much "bad press" that can be printed before
people start believing the lies told in the media.

This is not to say that one cannot poke fun here on Bee-L.  The rule seems
to be that one has to be subtle, so that only those who think hard about it
will get the joke.  For example, I recently ended a post in the "Metabolites
of Imidacloprid" discussion thusly:

> We have to get better at understanding this 
> low-level stuff, but the few who can educate 
> us will only take so much abuse before they 
> simply avoid beekeepers as a whole as a result
> of being shouted down.

> There are many unexpected findings cropping up all the time, for example,
this:
> http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2815%2901109-4
> http://tinyurl.com/plauwe5
> If the guys who study monkeys can be taken by surprise, so can we.

If you follow the link, you will read:

- Hyoid volume negatively correlates with number of males per group and
testes volume
- Larger hyoids lower formant spacing, increasing the acoustic impression of
body size
- Results provide the first evidence of a trade-off between vocal investment
and testes

The plain English of the above is that the louder monkeys have smaller
testes.

...and you thought Newton's "standing on the shoulders" was a good one!

I know these tales of intrigue, as I read lots of biographies of scientists.
They provided me with perspective and guidance in attempting to keep the
constant low-level bickering and skirmishes at the Bell Labs Greensboro
Works from breaking out into actual hard feelings, as it was obvious that of
5,000 employees, 90% of them had sufficient knowledge and skill to build
sophisticated car bombs if they chose to take things personally.  I had to
adjudicate several situations where things got a little out-of-hand, but
nobody got fired, and everyone shook hands and promised to act like they
wanted to keep getting paychecks.

But you guys ain't seen nuthin.

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