*!"Do You Believe in Science?"!*

Post Reply New Topic

What experiments are we talking about? Also are we talking about qualitative results or quantitative results?

To many scientists, just as to many historians and philosophers of science, facts are things that simply are the case: they are discovered through properly passive observation of natural reality. To such views Fleck replies that facts are invented, not discovered. Moreover, the appearance of scientific facts as "discovered things" is in itself a social construction, a "made" thing.

A work of transparent brilliance, one of the most significant contributions to a sociological account of scientific knowledge.

...a stylised signal of resistance in thinking.

They are supposed to be "universal laws"! Not dependent on completely artificial conditions of " flawlessness".

Detrimental to whom? Who is happier as a result of modern science? Is there more or less violence ( %) now than 2000 years ago?

But WHAT is it about modern society that shows we understand more now than then? Surely not just the fruits of science ? And without considering how much these have/cost us too? ...i am not prepared to completely believe/accept, without examination, or serious questioning, that because we have heating, cars, computers, longer lives, etc, we understand the world better.

In fact school may have functioned to select out people ( from scientific careers) who were not prepared to believe/have faith in science. We were asked to ignore/deny the evidence of our own senses, that something had done A, B, and C, and to accept/believe instead dogma handed out by authority ( the teacher or textbooks) that the "real" results should have been, ( would have been, if we or the material had been pure enough), x, y, and z.

I suddenly realise that this may be why pure-science students at university always seemed slightly christian to me, like acolytes/newly shaved monks.

And yet where has this discovery led, but to increased bacterial adaptation, "super-bacteria", and to increased dependence on medicine to treat illnesses people just fasted or fed themselves out of in many cases in the past. Also to wiping out the population of bacteria in the intestines which help us with absorption, metabolisation, protection, etc, which we receive at only one period in our lives, in our mothers milk.
I do not accept that the discovery of penicillin increased our understanding of the world. We are only just beginning to realise how much it led us into error.

But is 0.12 molars really different from 0.1162 molars?

do you mean moles?

Of course it has nothing to do with the fact that some of us did the experiments right...!

Has anyone read "Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life"? by Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin.

I've been reading reviews of it; there is one at:

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/2353.html

It was the moment of the revolution in science when experiment was first accepted as a valid method of natural philosophy, which is what science was called then, at the time of the Restoration, after all the civil war, and religious conflict. Boyle proposed using an air pump to carry out an experiment. Hobbes objected. He viewed experiments as "artificial unreliable products of an exclusive guild".

Interestingly they each argued for their position as the best solution to social unrest and instability.

Hobbes believed that "decision by committee", even when based on "detailed and modest presentations of matters" was "dangerous, likely to produce the same type of religious and civil strife" as during the civil war.
Boyle believed that by the use of "objective language" natural philosophers would be "inferred to be modest and trustworthy men". "Modest priests of nature", as the Royal Society called them, very unlike the religious enthusiasts claiming all knowledge "was result of individual revelation from god".

The study "shows us the historical precedent for our beliefs that experiments are the means to scientific truth, and explores the implications of scientific knowledge as social construct".

Hobbes lost the battle, despite the pump leaking, ( as Hobbes apparently predicted) and no one else being able to replicate Boyle's experiment for years, because the concept of "truth by experiment" was the "best solution to the problem of social order".

Robert Boyle [1627-1691]
Founder of Modern Chemistry/Gas Dynamics
Governor of Missionary organization for propagating the gospel in New England
Personally financed the translation of the Bible into Irish, Turkish, and Arabic
Author of "The Christian Virtuoso" reflecting on the study of nature for Christians
Author of Christian devotional book, "Occasional Reflections"
His will after his death financed the "Boyle Lectures" which were lectures in defense of Christianity
"From a knowledge of His work, we shall know Him"
"Christ's passion, His death, His resurrection and ascension, and all of those wonderful works which He did during His stay upon earth, in order to confirm mankind in the belief of His being God as well as man."

In terms of ratio, I'd bet that there is less violence.
Who is happier? Anyone who used to be on the bottom.
We are living in a golden age.
Humans as a whole understand more. We live lives less circumscribed by superstition and less circumscribed by a whole host of '-isms' that used to hold down the lives of huge proportions of the population.

Interesting facts and quotes by Boyle.

I believe in science, because in science, there is no dogma (or shouldn't be at least) but only theories. People argue that evolution is only a theory, and then I remind them that so is relativity and anything else. Theories become similar to dogma the more evidence accrues in their favor, but new valid information can alter or eliminate a theory.

If the law, theory or hypothesis has been discredited by the data, then it should no longer exist because it is no longer valid.

An Open Letter to the Scientific Community
cosmologystatement.org

(Published in New Scientist, May 22, 2004)

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory's explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.

Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that "science is the culture of doubt", in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics, are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific inquiry.

Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peer-review committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining, irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory.

Giving support only to projects within the big bang framework undermines a fundamental element of the scientific method -- the constant testing of theory against observation. Such a restriction makes unbiased discussion and research impossible. To redress this, we urge those agencies that fund work in cosmology to set aside a significant fraction of their funding for investigations into alternative theories and observational contradictions of the big bang. To avoid bias, the peer review committee that allocates such funds could be composed of astronomers and physicists from outside the field of cosmology.

Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang's validity, and its alternatives, would allow the scientific process to determine our most accurate model of the history of the universe.