Sun has been emitting unknown particles, carbon dating may be completely off

Genius Gone Insane said:
You say I am "telling physicists something they already know far better than you seem to credit". <--this is the flaw in your argument. Our observations are all fucked up. I have not once read anything in one book, online, paperback, ever, that posed the question: "Are spiral galaxies actually shaped like a spiral?" Or "Is what we see what is actually out there?" Not once. Ever.
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Jeff's said pretty much everything i'd want to, so I wont bother going over it all again.

Having said that, what you're looking for here are philosophers, not physicists.

The entire point of physics (and science in general) is taking observations and forming theories/models based on those observations. This has proved to be a successful attitude (see the sum total of human technology). If you assume all material evidence is inherantly unreliable, then you cut off any line of investigation at the start. It's interesting to think about, but almost by definition it's not going to get you anywhere.
 
Genius Gone Insane said:
^This is exactly what I'm saying. This is looking through the eyes of a child and not a scientist. You can write up all the science you want, but to me that's the same as saying "if it's in the Bible then it has to be true." Scientists and Bible thumpers are essentially the same thing. Saying the earth is 13 billion years old is exactly the same as when they used to say the earth revolves around the sun. Yes, exactly the same. We are observing from earth. ALL our observations are from earth. To say anything definitive about the universe based on our observations is ridiculous. Yet science preaches this methodology religiously.
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I have to stop there. That is just not true, at all.

The basis of both concepts are so radically different, I don't even know how you can say that. It's indeed true science has been "wrong" many times, sometimes for centuries, but that's not a reason why you should say that, that's just plain wrong.

Sciences proves thing by facts, hypotheticodeductive reasonning, and is able to refute itself when the proof is given and the time comes, and this has been done SO MANY TIMES. If today you are able to say "look, by then, they were wrong and they all thought they were right" it is also because at some point physicists (scientists) realized it, and changed their mind accordingly, and went another route or deviation of this route. This doesn't happen in religion. Oh yeah they would sometimes sit together in the Vatican and spend a week or two debating if the christ was this or that, but that is not even comparable.

This by essence contradicts your description of Science as something you "trust" in. No one "trusts" in science, if he says it, he just uses the casual meaning of that term. It has nothing to do with what you think or not, it just is, is limited by human factors of course (not being able to think outside the box which sounds stupid 300 years later with our modern eyes). And if it IS like this, it is because of maths first, which are the best thing ever invented by Man to help himself understand the world, because maths just do not care about what you think about them, they are what we invented by the definition of a few axioms with the hidden objective of being one day able to help us match reality and its characteristics together (N associated with +, also known as "1+1=2" generally speaking, hasn't been invented for fun and one would be surprised how deep your can study such a supposedly simple thing)

Sciences preaches nothing. If anything, "preaching" scientific method, and the term is badly chosen. Also, at some point, things NEED to be taught. We can't teach you a physics course in high school and at every line add an * which refers to "is currently accepted but might be proven wrong one day and removed from 24th centuries students books so pleasure do not actually learn it and instead shit on physicists". Nor we care.

The problem with your marble eyes, child vision, is that it's mostly beautiful words, and nothing else. I myself enjoy the way a kid sees life, and I like to have this mode of interaction with my environment sometimes. But I'm sorry to disagree with the assumption the big brains of our history succeeded because they are able to see the world like children. That is not true, they obviously have a better ability to think outside the box, and be creative. But they are also pretty hard workers, or geniuses, or both together, they failed a lot until they succeeded, it just didn't happen by contemplation alone. You need that to find a physics answer, because at some point you'll have a matricial or tensor equation to solve, and that would be just one obstacle amongst many others. And no 16yo kid is gonna put words into whatever "solution" you have in your head. This "solution" is just some kind of feeling of acceptance of your "destiny" or something like that that pleases you, and it's this kind of pleasure religious people embrace and like to stay in. And I pretty much know, by experience, argumenting here is only gonna push you even more into your grounds. But by all means, don't use the child argument, because until now, no child has ever solved an ethical/physicist problem, or maybe by luck. A lot of problems are even solved by computers (because they save us gazillion of manpower). Please don't use the typical counter argument "you're an adult and you're obviously now thinking like an adult, it's sad that you lost your child eyes". That would be equivalent to "it's too bad you're not religious, if you were, you would understand and see clearly". This would also puts you at the same level of well known juggalos and I'm gonna quote them here :

Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
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I'm sorry if the post sound harsh or angry or anything, I'm actually not and just watching TV but I just couldn't not react to this. Also, just noticed it, but current theory is that earth is around 4.5 or 5 billion years old, not 13
 
Genius Gone Insane said:
You say I am "telling physicists something they already know far better than you seem to credit". <--this is the flaw in your argument. Our observations are all fucked up. I have not once read anything in one book, online, paperback, ever, that posed the question: "Are spiral galaxies actually shaped like a spiral?" Or "Is what we see what is actually out there?" Not once. Ever.
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I still don't get what you mean with your spirals and galaxies. Specialists have had pictures, using all frequencies, and indirect observations of what are galaxies. They even found galaxies in the state of collision one into another. If they were shaped like a stick and not a spiral, they would have noticed. They are questioning themselves about the tools to describe them, the formula which describe what is seen, but not what is seen itself, because it's been seen and they have seen it many times. I don't get your question because it's obvious and has no point, just take the picture of a galaxy and declare it spiral shaped or not, it's only a problem of description and language. I'm not even gonna talk about the possibility and data collected about angular speed of revolutions of stars around the center of a galaxy.

Now, saying physicists can't explain yet why their formula don't describe the same spiral is another thing. That just doesn't make the galaxy less of a spiral, kid eye or not. If anything, the kid eyes would have actually led to the conclusion of dark matter. I.e "oh so the mass in the galaxy is too light for it to have this shape ? then it must actually be heavier than we thought/see/sense"

The question they ask is "why can't we put our formula on it ?" hence why dark matter I guess. Just like we have the basic formula for attraction which we have used for decades to throw things in space, and which work good enough for applied physics in most cases, but is still not explained in the deepest and lowest levels of theories. If a lot of problems are solved with dark matter, it doesn't mean it's true (yet/not, only future can say that) and no one still has proven its existence. But it means there is something to dig in there, and the more problems would be solved by a "dark matter constant", which seems to imbricate into the other "dark matter constants" you would find in other fields, the more it would mean we should dig in this exact spots, unless one things finding more and more evidence, empirically, is a good argument to stop and do a 180

The matter that people think dark matter exists or not is not directly relevant (except that we will only know if enough people work on that so that we have a final answer about this), it has nothing to do with trusting in it, it has to do with trying to prove its actual existence or not, and if not, then to find what is missing there and how to call it, and ask ourselves twice as many questions when we get there.
 
^
- these people who come back from terminal cancer didn't do it by magic. It is not because we can't explain it, that it can't be explained. That's the purpose of research.
- don't know what you are referring to with those 10 feet high human rests. Is that any reliable ? I doubt so but I'm open for the readings (at least for shits and giggles if I read somewhere they proved it wasn't true through study of his/hers teeth), after all we had a few cases of very, very tall guys in england and china.
- sciences says it explains things and looks away at others... what ? Tell me the name of any cancer specialist who wouldn't like to know why someone comes back from terminal cancer ? Tell me the name of any biologist who wouldn't give his own house to find a legit and proven-real 10 ft high human body. If any of those bodies was legit, for sure we would know it because the international community would have been amazed and passionate about it.
- who said we believe we will know everything ? we always say every answer raises two new questions, and we all know our specy will be probably extinct before we even get close to the end if there is any end. Now how is it a counter argument ? Why would it make it useless to search for answers ? That's because of that philosphy that you're posting today on a computer made of physics and that you can expect to live more than 30 years, thanks to biomedicine and research
- why do you say you enjoy your life ? do you assume you cannot enjoy your life as much if you have a scientific mind ? to me Jeff is the least negative guy on this topic. He's the one looking forward, if anything. Of course you have to deal with his style

EDIT : what happened to the post this post answered to ?
 
Genius Gone Insane said:
I'm not claiming to know what the fuck is going on. But that's a step ahead of the science community who is making up the rules as they go along, a la fundamentalist Christians.
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What a way to tar and feather a whole community based on your perceived notions of a small part of that community. Akin to thinking all black people are gangsta rappers, or that all Southern Americans are redneck arseholes.

Good one!

PS: http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

Pick yours.
 
I'm getting pretty tired of seeing people insist in some way that science is a religion. It's such a fucking idiotic train of thought. Science has built in checks and balances to ensure that it doesn't become a dogmatic waste of space belief system. It ISN'T a belief system!!
 
I might be an armchair scientist who reads too many discovery channel articles but can you really fault me for being troubled by this:

http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMW6HVJ15G_index_0.html
"The astronomers show that the Hubble sequence six billion years ago was very different from the one that astronomers see today. &#8220;Six billion years ago, there were many more peculiar galaxies than now &#8211; a very surprising result,&#8221; says Rodney Delgado-Serrano, lead author of the related paper recently published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. &#8220;This means that in the last six billion years, these peculiar galaxies must have become normal spirals, giving us a more dramatic picture of the recent Universe than we had before.&#8221;

The astronomers think that these peculiar galaxies did indeed become spirals through collisions and merging."
 
Let me paraphrase: "Six billion years ago (or is it 4 billion years ago? Or is it 13 billion? We can't decide), galaxies looked different than they do now. That's strange. It couldn't be that there is a problem with our observations because if our observations didn't work we wouldn't have cell phones and other technology. It must be because when galaxies collide they become spirals. Ya that must be it. It couldn't be that there is something wrong with our observations. That's something an armchair scientist would say."
 
Genius Gone Insane said:
That's a genuine question?

You know, we're all here having a friendly discussion in the tavern and then you come try and derail it by insulting me. Thanks buddy.
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I fail to see how asking if you've spent time reading scholarly articles is insulting, and you dodged the hell out of the question right after that. Bad sign.

Genius Gone Insane said:
Let me paraphrase: "Six billion years ago (or is it 4 billion years ago? Or is it 13 billion? We can't decide), galaxies looked different than they do now. That's strange. It couldn't be that there is a problem with our observations because if our observations didn't work we wouldn't have cell phones and other technology. It must be because when galaxies collide they become spirals. Ya that must be it. It couldn't be that there is something wrong with our observations. That's something an armchair scientist would say."
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How is that paraphrasing? They didn't mention 4 or 13 billion in there, and they certainly don't just jump to the first sentence that passes a spell check when trying to figure out how things happen.

You are really just unnaturally, illogically obsessed with throwing everything out because we can't be perfectly sure that our observations are perfect. We know that we'll have better observations later and that there may be mistakes, but we have *overwhelming* amounts of data in a lot of areas and before jumping to the first easy conclusion (and dismissing your pet prattling as armchair scientist, *which they don't even do*) and *we work with that as best as we can*. I fail to see

(1) why you're so obsessed with the idea that space is just out to get you, given your total lack of reason to believe that it's the case
(2) why you're unable to see that there are already checks in place to prevent problems like those you describe
(3) why you can't see that we don't need a whole lot of information to refute a theory
(4) where the hell you're going with this anyway.

I'll elaborate on the first one. There may be some warping, but like looking through a warped piece of glass we can figure out a lot about how to take this warping into account. We see the celestial bodies moving in the way that they 'look like they should', we see light behaving as it's supposed to, we see the interactions doing as we expect... nothing religious here at all. We have hypotheses about how spirals like this form, and we test them, and that is how science happens - not "Maybe the spiral is a straight line! Maybe everything is slightly more lavender than previously assumed! Maybe left is actually right OH NO WE'VE ALL BEEN DRIVING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE AAAAA!", despite how much fun you seem to be having.

If you have any sensible sort of reason to believe that the laws of physics just don't happen elsewhere - and the simple fact of the matter is that nothing along those lines has actually been found... not really helping your practically pointless paranoid pseudophilosophy. You may enjoy thinking that you're onto something big and useful, but you've given no predictions, nothing testable, no possible description of what could be completely screwing up our observations... we take the simplest usable explanation, test it, and see what happens. If you really think that everything is ruined forever because you're somehow opposed to Ockham's Razor and nobody else is willing to follow you on your wild goose chase without the slightest hint of evidence, you're just not going to get anything. The 'flaw in my argument', that nobody asks 'What if nothing is real and we're in the Matrix and spiral galaxies aren't spirals and what we see isn't there and gravity is just pixies pissing while lying on their backs?', is only a flaw to the absolutely deranged - if Ockham's Razor is scary to you, that's fine, but just because you can't be trusted with sharp things doesn't mean that nobody else should get to shave.

I overstated your position a few posts ago. You're no more an armchair scientist than I am an armchair rugby coach - and that's saying something, given that I still have to look up how to spell rugby in the dictionary. You don't seem to understand the basic principles of science or even apply any logic to anything done so far. You're worse off than the stereotypical undereducated Tea Partier trying to argue economics, because at least the Tea Partier has probably seen money at some point. I simply have no idea how so many things have gone so wrong with someone able to form sentences, and I'm doubting that you're even observing the same reality as anyone else at this point. Short of religious convictions or a history of repeated sexual assault by violent rogue astronomers I see no reason why you're so upset by one of the oldest hard sciences.

Jef
 
JBroll said:
I fail to see how asking if you've spent time reading scholarly articles is insulting, and you dodged the hell out of the question right after that. Bad sign.
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No, I would have had no problem if he had asked it like that. Go reread his post from my perspective. He was insulting. You've punched at me, but you've been respectful.

The truth is I don't think I've read any scholarly articles on this. But I have read a shitload of books by scholars on it.
 
I'm trying to see how that was disrespectful, and I'm just drawing a blank. Are we looking at the same post, even?

More important, though, is whether you're enough into the subject to have pulled out a scholarly paper - even an above-average-layman introduction by a practicing cosmologist would be a start. What's the story?

Jef
 
JBroll said:
I'm trying to see how that was disrespectful, and I'm just drawing a blank. Are we looking at the same post, even?

More important, though, is whether you're enough into the subject to have pulled out a scholarly paper - even an above-average-layman introduction by a practicing cosmologist would be a start. What's the story?

Jef
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There was no third option. It was "either you've read scholarly papers or you are retarded." I belong somewhere in between but there was no option for that answer.

Anyway, enough butthurt on that...If you can show me a scholarly paper that you think would benefit me, I'll gladly read it. But I assure you I'll reach the same conclusions.

IMO There is too much mumbo jumbo in the whole cosmology world. It's like an intricate spiderweb of patches. Yeah sure, it works, but to me developing theories using our later 20th century physics and wondering why there have been no gigantic discoveries is similar to upgrading your laptop to 500 Terabytes of RAM and running it on Microsoft Windows with all your antivirus turned on and wondering why it isn't any faster than your old computer.

I have done a lot of book reading on the subject. I am well-educated and I have a good corporate job where I get to see corporate data being applied to the real world. I see corners getting cut every day, and I see the consequences in the business world. I see how you can often manipulate data any direction you want. Most important, I see the effects of data, finance, and agenda as they work together.

This would not be a problem if the the academic/scientific world were as pure as it should be and did not have to worry about finance and agenda. But let's face the facts. These experiments and research is expensive, and it's getting paid for largely by corporate donations. And corporations are on an agenda. And so are starving graduate students who can't afford to miss a deadline on a project. Combine corporations looking for certain results along with starving students and it is all a big clusterfuck waiting to happen. And I fear that many branches of science have been bitten by this bug.

Is the concept of Dark Matter a construct built by corporations to prevent a radical discovery in science? (That just now occurred to me btw). I sure as hell hope not. But as long as dark matter is there, we can always say "oh, let's just blame it on dark matter...everyone else is doing it."

Horse Puckey. There is a MAJOR issue with science. Dude we don't even understand the first thing about gravity. Think about that. How can we even think to propose a guess about how gravity behaves a million light years away? It is ridiculous to assume that just because our formulas tend to work that we "understand gravity on large scales, well except for this dark matter thingy. But we're working on that."

Bull shit. Everyone is on the wrong track. This happens over and over in history and we are always so wrapped up in the latest knowledge and ideas that we fail to consider that some of the stuff we learned in the past may actually be inaccurate.

Think about how many people work in the science industry nowadays and how relatively few major groundbreaking discoveries there have been in the past 80 years? It's disproportionate.

I don't think it's asking that much for scientists to start second-guessing and retesting their fundemental theorems and ideas.
 
The third option was 'I'm not retarded but I haven't read scholarly papers'. I didn't see the implication that people who don't read scholarly papers are retarded, but if that was his intention I'll gladly retract that.

If you're wondering why 'there have been no gigantic discoveries' using 'our later 20th century physics', the problem has been pretty clear - there have been gigantic discoveries, but they're not as layman-friendly or well-publicized as 'space is weird WHOA and also I have weird hair'. If that's your criticism, you can rest easy - it's based entirely on a fiction and you're misinformed, full stop. And what's 'mumbo-jumbo'? Now you're unhappy because new ideas need words?

Not all fields have research funded by corporations - public grants are more common in fields like what we're discussing, and even if the researchers were biased their peer-reviewers would catch it. (Notice that this has happened in medicine and biology, and it's not pretty when someone gets caught.) Another problem in your view.

"Is the concept of dark matter a construct built by corporations to prevent a radical discovery in science?" To put it shortly, no. To put all of the words that could possibly be said on the matter... no. Nobody 'blames things on dark matter' the way you blame your dog for farting when your significant other makes the I-smelled-a-stinky face, and the fact that you'd suspect this further confirms that you don't know enough to have said many of the things you've said.

If you don't think that everyone considers that everything we know may be wrong, you're both literally blinded to the real situation and putting yourself on a *gigantic* pedestal. We test, we retest... like the examples I gave earlier, which are going on *as we speak*. Where do you get off claiming that physics just decided that everything in the past was perfect? You're simply wrong!

Finally, to claim that 'relatively few major groundbreaking discoveries' have occurred in the last 80 years indicates that you do, in fact, live in an entirely different reality or that you have no idea what's going on. Granted, we can explain to laymen 80-year-old science much more easily, but that doesn't mean that we're going nowhere.

In short, it is about time for *you* to consider that whatever you think about science may actually be inaccurate. You're just... so... unbelievably wrong on so many counts, and you can't even see that the problem you're inventing for physics is actually far more severe a problem of *yours* than anyone you're criticizing. Nonphysicist, heal thyself.

Jef
 
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