Doctored Quote

The authority of this tradition is maintained by the community of scientists as a whole. This community is held together by the free acceptance by its members of the authority of the tradition. Attempts to organize science from a single center, such as those made at certain times in Russia, have failed and are bound to fail. The authority of the tradition is maintained by the free assent of its members. But it is, nonetheless, a powerful authority. It is exercised in practice by those who determine which articles will be accepted for publication in scientific journals and which rejected, and by those who determine appointments to teaching and research posts in universities and other institutions. There is no appeal within the scientific community against this authority, and any appeal outside falls on deaf ears. Polanyi in various writings has given a number of examples of theories put forward with a considerable body of evidence to support them but which have been rejected without examination or discussion by the scientific community. Among the many examples given I quote just one. In 1947 Lord Rayleigh, a distinguished member of the Royal Society, published an account of an experiment which demonstrated that a hydrogen atom impinging on a metal wire releases energies ranging up to a hundred electron volts. If this were true, it would have enormous implications for physics. But the article was ignored. No one attempted to repeat the experiment or to discuss it. It was simply implausible within the existing frame of understanding. And, says Polanyi, scientists were right to ignore it. If every experiment which purported to show novel results was followed up by detailed examination and debate, science would evaporate into futility. Great numbers of articles offered to scientific journals are rejected without discussion simply because they fall outside the accepted tradition. Without this careful protection of the tradition, science could not develop. Yet if the tradition did not make room for radical innovation, science would stagnate. The point to be made seems to be twofold: first, innovation can only be responsibly accepted from those who are already masters of the tradition, skilled practitioners of whom it could be said both that the tradition dwells fully in them and that they dwell fully in the tradition; and second, that one alleged new fact, or even a number of new facts, does not suffice to discredit an established paradigm. That can only happen when a new and more compelling paradigm is offered, a vision of reality which commends itself by its beauty, rationality, and comprehensiveness.

The point to be made seems to be twofold: first, innovation can only be responsibly accepted from those who are already masters of the tradition, skilled practitioners of whom it could be said both that the tradition dwells fully in them and that they dwell fully in the tradition; and second, that one alleged new fact, or even a number of new facts, does not suffice to discredit an established paradigm. That can only happen when a new and more compelling paradigm is offered, a vision of reality which commends itself by its beauty, rationality, and comprehensiveness.

To the extent that such is post-modernism, I really can't say. 
It does seem reactionary, but at any given moment, what doesn't?