You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: The End Of Reason: A Glimpse Behind The Curve
What about the scientists that strongly disagree with what you said? Are those scientists very retarded and stupid?
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.
There are strong differences between observing things in the recent past, and ongoing, in a continual process, the scientific process, and simply looking at something from long ago that you were not there to see in the process. The two are two different types of sciences. They're not the same in a variety of ways. That should be the emphasis. Of course, everything is in the past. But that is not the difference between the two sciences. The difference is that one is past-tense while the other is past-tense continuous. The second one is ongoing in the moment as the experiments and observations are taken place in real-time.
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.
I was asking you a question and not making a statement. I didn't say you can or cannot try to determine things from the past. However, in doing so, you may make too many assumptions on patterns, on how things were, on the rate of decay that things may have, on certain events, especially when they contradict what we do observe. Again, there are many cases that you seem to be either ignoring or you may unaware of what I'm talking about because you have NOT brought up these cases of things that have happened the past few thousands of years. There are strong contradictions that we can see in those cases. We should talk about those cases. We should talk about how these scientists say one thing while the other scientists say something different while providing concrete evidence. Why don't we talk about the evidence of Mount St. Helens in 1980 when we also talk about the formation of the Grand Canyon?
Fair enough but I believe that you are also making asumptions above what I believe to be true (and the reasons for me doing so). I am just stating that any claim needs to be backed by evidence and a working body of knowledge. That is why I have said twice in past comments that I would like to know the specifics.
If you can point me to the scientist that you are refering to I will more than glad to review there claims and have a clear picture of where you are coming from.
Why don't you already know what I'm talking about? Are you saying that you only know about the scientists that agree with you and not the thousands and thousands of scientists that disagree with you? When scientists disagree with what you believe, you ignore it you move on?