Science Thoughts

Posted by on

It’s been a while since I’ve had science thoughts — You can thank Babesleaga for that.

However, the “overwhelming majority” of you are scientists in one field or another.

The problem is, the press keeps saying that the science is settled. In some fields. Like climatology.

On the other hand, they are constantly finding new things to panic about. In some fields. Like climatology. So how can it be settled — without being too precipitous? (Heh. One for the English major.)

Actual scientists always counter that science is never settled: that it is simply a method, not a text engraved in stone. Because you know what that is? That’s an engraving. On a tomb.

Those who express that opinion are shouted down and defunded. After all, Faucci said that if you attack him, you are attacking Science. The “overwhelming majority” of which has now — in his opinion, apparently — become a data point.

And if you continue to object, guys with pitot tubes or Bunsen burners will be infiltrated into your house. But not by the FBI. Or by the Knights Who Say NIH. … Oh, no.

So, who should one trust in Science? Or should one trust in Science at all? I vote for anyone who gets us a George Jetson flying car in the future, which fits into a suitcase. The flying car, I mean, not the future. But that would make a pretty good science fiction story, too.

1

20 Comments

  1. Precipitous – noun
    1.
    Chemistry
    the action or process of precipitating a substance from a solution.
    2.
    rain, snow, sleet, or hail that falls to the ground.
    “these convective processes produce cloud and precipitation”
    …It’s all beginning to make sense now.

    2
    Reply to this comment

    • Mr. Spock: “You are correct Jim. The James Webb is NASA’s most powerful space observatory, designed to study infrared astronomy. It makes the Kepler telescope look like a Mattel toy..which is entirely logical.”

      1
      Reply to this comment

  7. You can state that certain items are settled relative to the input assumptions (e.g. in Euclid’s postulates for geometry, you can change the 7th of his (effectively only one unique line can be defined by two points) to get an entirely different geometry that happens to work in a gravity-based (Einstein-ian) world. This does not mean that Euclidean geometry is at all invalid. These other geometries are entirely consistent and work within their assumptions.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Euclidean_geometry

    So, if you make an assumption, then you can state that your science is consistent within the world of the assumption. In some cases, the assumptions may fly in the face of logic or reality. Eventually, you may learn that your assumption and the believed behavior are false. In those cases, can one say the science is “unsettling”?

    As has no doubt been said a number of times in a number of different blogs or posts, when I was in 2nd grade, the big fear was global cooling and the coming ice age. Now the fear is global warning. To me, the underlying potential error is the assumption that humans can take action that will globally affect the weather or climate on a macro level.

    As the saying goes, “good luck with that”.

    4
    Reply to this comment

  8. Through every point in history society has considered itself at the cutting edge of knowledge. And at every point in history society has dismissed the outdated truths of the past as primitive and shockingly ignorant.

    This is despite, or maybe in spite of, the fact that there are lighthouses of wisdom that shine out from the past that baffle and amaze us.

    How could those primitive dopes have built those pyramids? What in the heck was the Antikythera device? Roman concrete, Archimedes death Ray’s? True Damascus steel? We can just hand wave those away as fairy tales. It’s easy for the future to forget how to do what might have been considered exeptional in the past.

    Are you aware that we currently don’t remember how to make a Saturn rocket?

    Science is cool. But man, we gotta stop forgetting the past, and we gotta realize that our grandchildren will be laughing at our primitive nature in the future.

    1
    Reply to this comment

    • “… there are lighthouses of wisdom that shine out from the past that baffle and amaze us.”

      Quoting from a book here, that was a textbook for schoolchildren in 1935 (“Wonder Book of the World’s Progress”):

      Herodotus tells us that once upon a time — which time, as the modern computator shows us, was about the year 590 B.C. — a war had arisen between the Lydians and the Medes and continued five years.

      … In the sixth year a battle took place in which it happened, when the fight had begun, that suddenly the day became night. And this change of day Thales, the Milesian, had foretold to the Ionians, laying down as a limit this very year in which the change took place. The Lydians, however, and the Medes, when they saw that it had become night instead of day, ceased from their fighting and were much more eager, both them, that peace should be made between them.

      Astronomers date the eclipse to 585 B.C.

      The book adds:

      Whether borrower or originator, however, Thales is credited with the expression of the following geometric truths:

      1. That the circle is bisected by its diameter.
      2. That the angles at the base of an Isoceles triangle are equal.
      3. That when two straight lines bisect each other the opposite angles are equal.
      4. That the angle in a semicircle is a right angle.
      5. That one side and one acute angle of a right-angled triangle determine the other sides of the triangle.

      .

      … his method [in #5] being precisely the same in principle as that by which the guns are sighted on a modern man-of-war.

      2
      Reply to this comment

  9. Same book:

    Xenophanes. The father of geology and paleontology.

    Mid-500’s, B.C.

    Hippolytus records: “Xenophanes believes that once the earth was mingled with the sea, but in the course of time it became freed from moisture; and his proofs are such as these: that shells are found in the midst of the land and among the mountains, that in the quarries of Syracuse the imprints of a fish and of seals have been found, and in Paros the imprint of an anchovy at some depth in the stone, and in Melite shallow impressions of all sorts of sea products. He says that these imprints were made when everything long ago was covered with mud, and then the imprint dried in the mud.”

    Not exactly slouches.

    The author points out that, almost two thousand years later, Leonardo da Vinci came to the same conclusion.

    But it wasn’t until well over another thousand years after him that it became codified in science.

    1
    Reply to this comment

    • I think we forget that our modern trappings make us somewhat thought avoidant.

      If it takes 3 months for your letter to reach your beloved across the sea, you will put much more care and effort into your correspondence than someone with a cell phone camera, X, and a zipper.

      There was a time, absent YouTube, when distraction was not so readily abundant.

      Perhaps it’s boredom that is the mother of invention.

      2
      Reply to this comment

  12. Oh, Bob, but it does!

    For a few dollars more, Mr. Politician, I’ll give you the conclusions you want and claim the science is settled and hundreds of us will write a letter predicting doom!! And after we make this particular discovery that WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE REAL SOON NOW, it will take even more money to prove it’s settled over and over and over and…

    Reply to this comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.