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In light of the balls-tighteningly awesome news from today's NASA press release, add the model of life to the list of "debunked" science myths. :)

At 12/2/10 06:02 PM, Imperator wrote: In light of the balls-tighteningly awesome news from today's NASA press release, add the model of life to the list of "debunked" science myths. :)

you have to link, man; i was excited at the prospect of new NASA findings, but what it is was better then expected.

i'm assuming i found the right one?

At 12/2/10 06:02 PM, Imperator wrote: In light of the balls-tighteningly awesome news from today's NASA press release, add the model of life to the list of "debunked" science myths. :)

a bacteria that uses ARSENIC as the building block of its very being? interesting. Arsenic kills pretty much much anything, and these little fellas thrive on the stuff.

At 12/2/10 08:46 PM, SolInvictus wrote: you have to link, man; i was excited at the prospect of new NASA findings, but what it is was better then expected.

i'm assuming i found the right one?

I don't need to link it, because I knew you'd come along and do my homework for me!!! MWAHAHA!
PS: Yes, that's the one.

At 12/2/10 08:56 PM, Korriken wrote: a bacteria that uses ARSENIC as the building block of its very being? interesting. Arsenic kills pretty much much anything, and these little fellas thrive on the stuff.

Fucking awesome, isn't it?

So what you need to form life (the 6 essential elements) now has an asterisk. You can sub arsenic for phosphorus.

#1 That's huge in terms of what we know about the formation of life.
#2 Gives us a new direction to go out looking for more life (including looking back at certain mars rocks and meteorites)

At 12/2/10 06:02 PM, Imperator wrote: In light of the balls-tighteningly awesome news from today's NASA press release, add the model of life to the list of "debunked" science myths. :)

And in a brilliantly-timed manner, my point is made for me!

Scientists are already challenging the findings of the Arsenic bacterium and Penrose's background radiation patterns. We shall see how it turns out in... THE FUTURE!

At 12/7/10 04:33 PM, Ravariel wrote: And in a brilliantly-timed manner, my point is made for me!

Scientists are already challenging the findings of the Arsenic bacterium and Penrose's background radiation patterns. We shall see how it turns out in... THE FUTURE!

I love science. One of the few fields where slamming another person's work as shoddy is encouraged, and in fact, praised.

People can make their careers off simply debunking the claims of other scientists.

I have access to JSTOR, I could probably look up some of these articles!

It's like having front row seats at the AWESOME SHOW!!!

There's only two ways that the universe as we know it came to be:

Alex Mason made it.

God took a gigantic shit and was so impressed by its size he let it be, thus starting the tradition all men must honor, which is forgetting to flush the goddamn toilet.

If we're talking myths here, I found onehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

At 11/30/10 09:59 AM, Ravariel wrote: For my first trick, I shall show you that the Big Bang was not, in fact, the beginning of the universe, and that we have found evidence for events that happened PRIOR.

Just because one paper has been published on the matter does not mean that the issue has been resolved.

At 11/30/10 05:54 PM, Ravariel wrote:

At 11/30/10 10:52 AM, SohlTofang wrote: This doesn't mean that ALL science is wrong, dummy!

Yeah, it does. In no area of science are we at the end of possible knowledge. In all areas our understanding, ability, and theories can be improved, thus lowering the amount of "wrongness" in each.

If all science is wrong, gravity doesn't exist, and I'm a hat.

A theory can't be "correct" or "incorrect." A theory is a set of concepts and rules, not a question or a statement with a true or false value. To say whether a theory is "right" or "wrong" is meaningless. A theory is either accepted or not.

At 12/1/10 05:40 AM, RightWingGamer wrote: the unknown brit

Just because you haven't heard of Roger Penrose doesn't mean squat.

At 12/10/10 06:02 PM, KemCab wrote: Just because one paper has been published on the matter does not mean that the issue has been resolved.

That's... kinda the entire point.

If all science is wrong, gravity doesn't exist, and I'm a hat.

Gravity isn't science. Science is a procedure for creating explanations of things like gravity. It is constrained by observational, logical, and informational limits, and as we can never have all information, we will always be short of the amount of information necessary to explain anything. Ergo, all science is incorrect... we simply work to make it less so.

Speaking of which, two new articles just dropped this past week which are brilliant examples of this.

First, in the New Yorker, an article about how the efficacy of rigorously tested drugs seems to be falling... and brings into stark relief the limits of science.

Then, in Scientific American, a rebuttal of sorts that, instead of questioning the value of the scientific method, instead praises the idea of scientific error... which is what I have been doing here, though my admittedly hyperbolic presentation has fooled many of you into thinking I am somehow denigrating science.

And, somewhat less topical, but still an interesting look into how our preconceptions of how research and development are often wrong, a new look at how the development of AI has radically changed since the days of attempting to mimic human thought.

At 12/10/10 04:07 PM, TheCrazyBill wrote: If we're talking myths here, I found onehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

*facepalm*

prove it.

Rav ,saying science is WRONG...is a bit melodramatic.
What's actually wrong is how we understand it...& that's based on what we know ,which then changes as we learn more, just like others have said here.

I like this quote from a person I am related to who has a phd..... I don't know if its his or something he's read or heard.
- " We are learning more & more about less & less, it is our goal that someday we hope to know everything about nothing ! " -unquote

Oh, it's not wrong, just incomplete.

Although it's worth noting that for scientists, pretty much all scientific knowledge is considered provisional.

If science isn't wrong, but merely incomplete, then what exactly is wrong?

At 12/29/10 06:55 PM, Bacchanalian wrote: If science isn't wrong, but merely incomplete, then what exactly is wrong?

Are you asking that if incompleteness is not incorrectness then what makes something incorrect?

Or are you asking if anything is actually wrong with science if incompleteness is the accepted standard?

At 12/29/10 09:03 PM, Ravariel wrote: Are you asking that if incompleteness is not incorrectness then what makes something incorrect?

This one.

At 12/29/10 10:32 PM, Bacchanalian wrote:

At 12/29/10 09:03 PM, Ravariel wrote: Are you asking that if incompleteness is not incorrectness then what makes something incorrect?

This one.

Incompleteness is when there is no explanation for something, incorrectness is when an explanation exists but is incongruent with reality.

Of course, some things in science aren't exactly "complete" or "incomplete," there's also situations where things are just approximated by increasingly accurate models.

At 12/29/10 10:32 PM, Bacchanalian wrote:

At 12/29/10 09:03 PM, Ravariel wrote: Are you asking that if incompleteness is not incorrectness then what makes something incorrect?

This one.

It's pretty much the same thing.
The only caveat is that we have no way of knowing if some things are right or wrong until we find out more information.

So as far as that goes, you can't do the whole "science has been wrong before" routine since no one could have possibly been right at the time anyway except by chance, which is still only verifiable in hindsight.

But overall, the whole "is it wrong/right" deal is not important in science because the point isn't to be ultimately right about stuff, it's to predict accurately and build things that work.

The toaster was never "wrong". The science that produced a toaster wasn't "wrong" as long as the toaster worked. But now we have better toasters. The point of the toaster was never to make the ultimate machine, it was to make the best toaster possible given the available knowledge.

The "science has been wrong before so let's not listen" philosophy doesn't build or advance anything, it only leads to way way way more mistakes than necessary. If you want a surefire way to be wrong more often in life, ignore science and flip coins instead.

At 12/30/10 02:48 PM, poxpower wrote: The toaster was never "wrong". The science that produced a toaster wasn't "wrong" as long as the toaster worked. But now we have better toasters. The point of the toaster was never to make the ultimate machine, it was to make the best toaster possible given the available knowledge.

Brilliant analogy! Thank you.

The "science has been wrong before so let's not listen" philosophy doesn't build or advance anything, it only leads to way way way more mistakes than necessary. If you want a surefire way to be wrong more often in life, ignore science and flip coins instead.

And this is another one of my hidden agendas in this thread: The refutation of people who claim that because the "consensus" of science is always changing, it is thus dumb to accept. People who point to the climate scares of the past 20 years and how those fears "came to nothing", or how Darwin's evolution isn't the same as punctuated equillibrium, or other current theories, and say that the scientific answer is wrong because it's been "wrong" before. When, as in your toaster analogy, we can see that it has never actually been "wrong" at all... merely limited by current knowledge and technology. Climate scientists 20 years ago didn't have the information about the multitude of factors that effect global climate. Darwin didn't have Punnitt squares and the Genome to inform his ideas. Newton didn't have the periodic table and knowledge of the strong and weak nuclear forces that made Alchemy impossible.

One of the fundamental points I have been trying to get across (in my normal sideways manner) is that we cannot look at any scientific idea outside of it's social and temporal context. Bringing current knowledge into past science to ridicule it is folly, and claiming that because science was wrong before, that it will be wrong again, and by several orders of magnitude, ignores the leaps and bounds we have made in knowledge and measurement since then.

Actually my point was not that science is always wrong, rather that, aside from statistical anomalies and fraud, science is always as right as it is possible to be.

I'm going to try to answer all of your at once...

Arguments like "it's not wrong, it's incomplete" and then "it's not incomplete, it's just approximated" seem grossly apologetic to me.

True and false are the domain of science. If science is a tool to predict phenomena and fashion working solutions, then the valuation of truth and fallacy is one of the essential mechanisms of that tool - both in development and in review. So skirting around how truth and fallacy apply to science on a whole strikes me as more a means to avoid stigma, than particularly honest.

An approximation is by definition an incomplete model, or at the very least born of one, and incongruent to reality at some scale.

Science has been wrong, and probably is right now, largely by virtue of knowledge being finite (incomplete). But, as Rav put it... as right as it is possible to be. I think you guys probably know my pretentious ass well enough to figure I'm not into the whole, "science is wrong, so I can disregard it and make up whatever I want" thing. :P

At 11/30/10 09:59 AM, Ravariel wrote: Weeeell, technically it's the current inflationary theory, but that title isn't as sexy. Basically this thread is how science is always wrong.

Stopped reading there.

At 12/31/10 02:33 AM, Bacchanalian wrote: I'm going to try to answer all of your at once...

Arguments like "it's not wrong, it's incomplete" and then "it's not incomplete, it's just approximated" seem grossly apologetic to me.

True and false are the domain of science.

Not exactly. Science is more about "false" and "not demonstrated to be false." Of course, when you consider that all scientific knowledge is provisional and that there may ultimately be no a priori reason for the behaviour of the little chunks of stuff that comprise the universe, then you can never really get better than incomplete and approximate.

Of course, the nice thing about science is that even though it may be incomplete and approximate, at least it's not bullshit.

At 12/31/10 02:33 AM, Bacchanalian wrote:

Arguments like "it's not wrong, it's incomplete" and then "it's not incomplete, it's just approximated" seem grossly apologetic to me.

Not really, it's just that people don't really know how science works so it comes as a shock to them to find out none of the answers were ever meant to be definitive.

I think the common view of science is that it makes "discoveries" and then that's something we know forever as true and so creationists think they have a point when they managed to show how X scientists were wrong about X thing.

Then the next step is to pretend like we can't know anything for certain, therefore everything is faith, therefore they're always right about everything because they feel it.

At 11/30/10 08:47 PM, Ravariel wrote:

Care to take a gander at what that dot on the top right is?

UMMMM its a fake looking satellite you photshoped in there you even made it sound obvious when u asked what we thout it was

Yes. most of all science we currently believe is wrong...The best SCIENTIST should know this. science is all theories that are manly accurate and can be worked off of to create more theories or invent objects.

HOWEVER in 1,000 years everything we currently know SHOULD be proved wrong and replaced with MORE accurate theories. all we do with science is accept it as the most accurate solution we currently know...if science was all fact then there would never be any breakthroughs ever... science is the pursuit of fact a pursuit that may very well never be completed

At 11/30/10 09:59 AM, Ravariel wrote: worked with both Einstein and Stephen Hawking

This is where I stopped reading.

lol

At 1/6/11 01:21 AM, 142201 wrote:

At 11/30/10 09:59 AM, Ravariel wrote: worked with both Einstein and Stephen Hawking

This is where I stopped reading.

lol

Penrose was in his mid-20s when Einstein died, and he is still alive today. Einstein was a relatively recent scientist, you know.

Not sure if they did in fact work together, but it's certainly not impossible.

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That's my summary of this thread.

At 1/6/11 04:41 PM, Elfer wrote: Not sure if they did in fact work together, but it's certainly not impossible.

Eh, perhaps a better phrase would have been "A contemporary of." Bad phrasing on my part.

At 12/31/10 11:02 AM, Elfer wrote: Not exactly. Science is more about "false" and "not demonstrated to be false."

No way. Ad-hoc-supernaturalism meets the latter condition.

Just because a solution may be provisional doesn't mean it can't be described as a solution. You aren't limited to describing it as 'something that hasn't yet been shown not to be a solution.'

At 12/31/10 01:04 PM, poxpower wrote:

Arguments like "it's not wrong, it's incomplete" and then "it's not incomplete, it's just approximated" seem grossly apologetic to me.

Not really, it's just that people don't really know how science works so it comes as a shock to them to find out none of the answers were ever meant to be definitive.

But... that point can be made without worming out of having to say science is wrong... or incomplete. Hell, in succession, the two statements I quoted above are contradictory in their attempt to trade out negative words for more innocuous ones.

I think the common view of science is that it makes "discoveries" and then that's something we know forever as true and so creationists think they have a point when they managed to show how X scientists were wrong about X thing.

Ahem... you mean... when they managed to show how X scientists were incomplete.

See? Mushy apologetic semantics.