Einstein is still smart
Posted: Thu May 05, 2011 8:37 pm
Very D@mned smart.
a discussion forum for Polywell fusion
https://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/
Well, what I was thinking was more that we might be heading into a time where we get/predict the 'right answers' but for the 'wrong reasons'. This is how religions and superstitions start - you say 'my theory of the coming of the Great White Handkerchief predicts that the skys will all be white tomorrow' and next day you see 8 octals of cloud cover and conclude that the GWH did, indeed, visit. Now substitute 'GWH' with 'big bang' and cloud cover with gravity, and away we go....Giorgio wrote:Yes, fortunately the good point of our era is that science has so many more possibilities to spread (in respect to the past) that sooner or later even some "disturbing" or "weird" result will find its way through mainstream science and get tested.
Whenever one of them is proven real it immediately opens a new branch of knowledge.
Just look at what happened with metamaterials.
But as we reach the edge of our understanding our self deluded framework will no longer give us all the right answers and it will start to matter if we are truly comprehending the nature of things. I am with the natural philosopher on this, we not only can, but should treat our understanding as correct for as long as it gives us all the right answers. We can even still treat newton's equations as correct for purposes like aiming moderate range artillery pieces, as those equations will give all the right answers for any problem to be solved in that set.chrismb wrote:Well, what I was thinking was more that we might be heading into a time where we get/predict the 'right answers' but for the 'wrong reasons'. This is how religions and superstitions start - you say 'my theory of the coming of the Great White Handkerchief predicts that the skys will all be white tomorrow' and next day you see 8 octals of cloud cover and conclude that the GWH did, indeed, visit. Now substitute 'GWH' with 'big bang' and cloud cover with gravity, and away we go....Giorgio wrote:Yes, fortunately the good point of our era is that science has so many more possibilities to spread (in respect to the past) that sooner or later even some "disturbing" or "weird" result will find its way through mainstream science and get tested.
Whenever one of them is proven real it immediately opens a new branch of knowledge.
Just look at what happened with metamaterials.
On the flip side, the Natural Philosopher might then ask 'does it matter if we truly comprehend the nature of things correctly, if the framework of our [self-delusion] gives us all the right answers?', and the answer is that it will matter, once you get to the edge of your understanding, which is where we stand today.
Is this not exactly Johann Prins' point?chrismb wrote:Experimenter bias, indeed. And the more 'sophisticated' the experiment, the more susceptible to minute bias it becomes. We have entered an age where 'nuanced' science has become legitimised, and in a way looking for such small and periodic signals that may or may not indicate a thing is the same logical basis for 'superstition'.
The piece missing is that no other person I am aware of [except for my own musings] has ever come up for a physically explicit rationale for why such effects should occur. It's more like a stab in the dark at what might happen, then the maths, and later the experiments, are formed around. We entered a new paradigm of science with Bohr when he simply stated quantum theory as an explanation for how atomic energy levels work, but there is no foundation for having arrived at that theory. Is this science? I would say it is, but it is a wholly different form of science to the Newton->Maxwell period, and we should recognise it as such and one that may well be taking us to the wrong conclusions.
D Tibbets wrote:Irregardless