Looking hungrily for new information on
neutrinos exceeding the speed of light, I stumbled upon
this New York Times article. Everything was going well, until this sentence smacked me upside the head with a mighty force:
Incredible claims require incredible evidence.
It was, I suppose, a loosely quoted phrase from
Carl Sagan:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
However, the author of the article seems to have used the word “incredible” without understanding it, thereby changing the meaning of the original quote to its exact opposite. Incredible claims, indeed, require
credible evidence.
2 comments:
According to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incredible, incredible means "extraordinary" and "improbable to be believed", but not "untruthful" or "not reliable". Which fits quite well into the context. To mean "not credible", it would have to be that, "not credible" or "non-credible".
And the thing doesn't automatically convert URLs to anchor tags.
– Inconceivable!
– You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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