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RE: The End Of Reason: A Glimpse Behind The Curve
You are correct, carbon dating has its limitations, which is why scientists use other more accurate forms to compliment it as shown here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
I'm not totally sure if you are trying to engage me in debate on the subject of flat earth/dinosaurs etc, or you're just making a general statement?
I'm not really sure how old the earth is because I was not there. I didn't observe the earth form. I believe the earth is round. I wonder, are Flat Earthers leftists?
I agree that we can't know exactly how old the earth is. However according to the current radiological dating it's 4.5 billion years old (give or take a few million due to unavoidable margins of error) and it's fairly well documented.
Out of curiosity, how old do you think the earth is?
What about the scientists that strongly disagree with what you said? Are those scientists very retarded and stupid?
The thing about science is that is not based on dogma. So everyone can disagree but at some point old theories that are less adequate to explain reality need to be discarded or understood in the context of more accurate representations of nature.
Take Newton's theory of gravity for example...it's very good at predicting the movement of planets but it can't explain some oddities in Mercury's rotation around the Sun, however General Relativity can be used to do this with extreme precision.
On the other hand General Relativity brakes down when trying to represent what happens at the singularity of a black hole so a new theory needs to be devised and tested (spolier, we are still not there yet).
Does the fact that Newton's theory of gravity fail to hold up under certain conditions made him stupid? No, it just proves he didn't have the whole picture as I am sure that we do not have the whole picture about alot of things.
Is there a difference between a theory and observational science of actually observing a chemistry experiment in live-time, in real-life, in-person, as it happens, in the flesh, not hypothetically, not theoretically, but simple observations LIVE, you know what I mean? How often do people contrast historical science with observational science?
Modern science has become so specialized and it requires so much time invested into it that ordinary people do not do it (and it would not be practical for the average Joe which is a unfortunate). Science and Engineering students on the other hand have to do it at least during their formation years (although not all institutions are at the same level).
The answer is yes, it is done, all the time, every year, around the world. In a more practical way every time that a plane takes off and lands is a testament that what we know about thermodinamics, friction, fluid dinamics, electricity, etc is accurate to an acceptable degree; every time that a transistor in your smart phone works proves that quantum tunneling is an accurate description of what happens at the subatomic level (to name a couple of examples). But the body of knowledge is so vast that no human being can test every theory out there and we have to defer to specialist even within the same fields.
A healthy dose of sckepticism about what we know is always good. Otherwise we would stagnate.
But there is a difference between what we know about our world and what we guess concerning things that happened long ago. For example, the Grand Canyon and Mount St. Helens.
We can only draw conclusions based on the evidence and the body of knowledge that we have. The time scales are not important as everything that we see ocurrs in the past, and I mean everything since the speed of light has a limit, even the events that happen in front of our eyes took place a few nano seconds before we perceive them.
That is why science is the best tool to acquire knowledge, it gives us a way of constantly improving our understanding as long as we remind ourselves that new discoveries might change how we view the world and we don't cling to outdated ideas.
I would say the two are constantly feeding into each other, so for instance, if I might come up with a theory that 10,000 years ago, when an ancient tribe performed a particular dance, it rained.
Then you come along and make lots of current observations about rainfall, after a while you report that you cannot find any modern incidences of a dance-rain connection.
What's more you report that you have discovered that precipitation has a lot to do with rain, and so therefore my theory breaks down. There might still be some people that agree with me, however your theory gains much more traction because it is backed up by observational evidence.
In the real world this happens all the time, so for instance Albert Einstein gave us the mathematics for discovering gravitational waves, however it took decades of observation and advances in technology before we could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
So we are constantly comparing historical science with current observational science.
Cg
Would you know how many times it rained in that ancient tribe without a scroll, a book, markings on the wall, or something that would say how many times it rained long ago? My question is all about trying to measure what we did not see ourselves, what we did not personally observed, seen.
Yes, in this case we look at rock formations, plant growth and a whole host of other things to which I'm not an expert.
Are you perhaps alluding to the Sphinx riddle?
I know that most scientists date the Sphinx at roughly the same time as the pyramids, however others like Graham Hancock date it much earlier because of evidence he says he has found regarding flooding/rainfall.
Cg
I would like to see why those scientists disagree with the current consensus.
Your argument is that because it is popular, it is then automatically right and perfect?
No, scientific consensus is built based on the ability of the scientific community to replicate the conclusions of an experiment or observation. Sometimes the consensus is wrong and it has to be discarded in favor of a more accurate representation of reality. That is why I would like to see how are they drawing their conclusions. There are no sacred ideas or authority figures in science.
Can we replicate the Big Bang?
No, but we can observe the movement of galaxy clusters and the microgave background radiation and then draw conclusions based on the available evidence. I find your position that if we don't observe an event happening in "real" time that you can't infer that it happened to be rather odd.
Maybe with the following analogy I can clarify why it is odd to me:
Imagine that you are driving down the road and you see two cars that appear to have crashed. There is an ambulance taking care of the wounded. You did not see the crash yourself but based on the available evidence you can draw the conclusion that both vehicules ran into each other.
The movement of galaxies and the microwave background radiation are the crashed cars and the ambulance in this analogy. The Big Bang is the event itself (the crash).
Currently there are alternative explanations to the Big Bang theory but they are not testable and we can't take them seriously...yet.
First of all let me say, really great debating @joeyarnoldvn and @onthewayout, thank you for enriching this post with your discourse!
You were not around before you were born, yet you can still accept things happening without you being there.
The dating methods scientists use are very accurate because they measure the incidents of particular chemicals which are extremely steady. If you'll indulge me a second I'll give an analogy.
Imagine a room that has a giant ball pit and in that pit is a solitary baby. This particular baby is very OCD and throws one ball out of the pit every 10 seconds without fail.
Then you come along, count all the balls outside of the pit and you can calculate with absolute accuracy how long the baby has been in there. This is rather like counting the amount of radioactive isotopes in a piece of rock.
At a guess, I would say that they range across the political spectrum.
Cg
Some scientists disagree with you. That is the thing that should be talked about. Don't ignore those scientists who disagree with you.
Of course, it's not science if some don't disagree, and nobody who disagrees is ignored.
Instead what we do is look at how they disagree, so for instance one scientist might say that a piece of rock is 4.5 billion years old, and he then presents reasons why, namely that he has measured radioactive isotopes in the rock that indicate its age.
Then we look at the method of dating, and conclude that indeed the decay of whatever isotope he is monitoring is stable, and we do that through observation.
Then another scientist comes and says I disagree, at that point we ask why?
If the scientist casts doubt on the original method, demonstrating via experiment that the method is flawed, yet can't come up with their own method, then we say, hmm, he appears to be onto something.
If however the new scientist comes along and says I disagree, yet doesn't provide any concrete reasons as to why he disagrees, then we say well, until you can articulate why, then we'll just carry on doing it our way.
That might seem like we're ignoring you, but we aren't, we are merely waiting for you to come up with some kind of evidence, because after all, we're scientists, and evidence is King.
Cg
They do disagree and they provide not only concrete reasons but also concrete evidence for the actual age for certain things through a variety of means. The fact you are not talking about it may mean that you do not know what I'm talking about which means you do not know the full story, the whole story, because you're not talking about it.
Radiometric dating
Radiometric dating, radioactive dating or radioisotope dating is a technique used to date materials such as rocks or carbon, in which trace radioactive impurities were selectively incorporated when they were formed. The method compares the abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope within the material to the abundance of its decay products, which form at a known constant rate of decay. The use of radiometric dating was first published in 1907 by Bertram Boltwood and is now the principal source of information about the absolute age of rocks and other geological features, including the age of fossilized life forms or the age of the Earth itself, and can also be used to date a wide range of natural and man-made materials.
Together with stratigraphic principles, radiometric dating methods are used in geochronology to establish the geologic time scale.
That's great @wikitextbot, but can you please start using paragraphs!
:-)
Cg