Can you make assumptions in science?

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Try getting a position as a "journalist", "teacher", "scientist" etc. if you don't "subjectively experience" the "truth" of officially approved "current opinion", which changes daily or hourly depending on what is being sold to the naïve and credulous masses.

Bah! If there are any genuinely "ruthlessly logical" 'Spergics around they have been chased away from 'sites like this by the "Thought Police". Arty, there is the "official version" of things (such as can be found on Wikipedia) and a real version which is to be thoughtlessly derided by anyone wanting to gain "credibility" in the "Establishment", or fad uniformity of ignorance.

I forget the 'name' of the song BUT..

A ya men.. A ya men.. A ya men...

A..MEN.. A..MEN A..MEN A..MEN...

A common misconception AND stereotype is that ALL so-called Aspergics are vanilla monotone Bill Gates Nerds..

Nah.. Some are passionate.. imaginative.. AND highly creative Geeks like Steve Jobs...

I made some assumptions once in science for the effect of humor.

I measured the radius of the Earth in my office in grad school.

My office had double doors -- it was originally meant to be a break room. We put a book case in front of the secondary double door.

So one day we set out to measure the radius of the Earth. We assumed that whoever made the bookcase was a professional and that the back of the book case pointed straight at the center of the Earth. Similarly we assumed that whoever hung the doors knew what they were doing and the back of the door also pointed straight at the center of the Earth.

Keeping these two explicit assumptions in mind, we measured the distance between the bookcase and door at the bottom of the door and again at a point about five feet higher than the first. From there, a little simple triangulation provided us with the radius of the Earth -- about 90 feet.

Just an example of the wonders you can "discover" by making assumptions.

Yes but those assumptions were based on prior evidence. In other words what you where assuming was the accuracy of the prior evidence, and in effect you were testing that evidence. In other words you did not make s**t up and get lucky.

Assumptions are not untested thought bubbles, they are either the basis for an Hypothesis which then gets tested rigorously or they are the result of experiment and are "assumed" to be correct, and their continued use tests them further.

Yec's on the other hand, read their holy book, assume it all to be true, then hear scientific evidence which disputes this, assume this all to be lies and a massive. All the while providing no verifiable evidence for their assumptions

Assumptions based on Faith

What are yec's?

By the way, many years ago I read Laffer's paper on his "Laffer Curve" one day while eating lunch at a very good little diner in the Houston area.

What struck me was the number of implicit assumptions involved. Not only did he not justify those assumptions, he didn't even acknowledge them.

Of course, Economics is not a science.

Young Earth Creationists. One of whom was the inspiration for this thread.

Thanks.

I think that the problem with Creationism is that if it were true, then they make God to be a liar.

After all, the evidence is overwhelming that the universe is far older and that the Earth has an extensive past. If God created the Earth a few thousand years ago, then he had to have intentionally left enormous amounts of bogus evidence that leads rational people to believe it to be far older. Thus, he is a liar.

I, for one, don't believe God to be a liar. That means that Creationism must be untrue. The hidden clues about the past are real and the universe is billions of years old.

Entirely predictable. The justification for ideological conjectures that violate all observational and experimentally demonstrable science is more conjecture and derision of anyone who says that the King is naked.

"An assumption based upon prior experience" is NOT an "assumption". An "assumption" is something taken on faith, and is unproven. If prior repeated expirement has shown that the moon is not made of green cheese then -using the proven fact that the moon is not made of green cheese as basis for further observation- is NOT making an 'assumption'. Its using proven fact.

That would be one kind of assumption.

What do you insist on contradicting yourself?


According the definition of "assumption" agreed upon in this thread "taking something unproven as fact" it is NOT an "assumption". If prior experiment has proven it-then you're not taking "something not proven as fact". If it IS proven then its proven, and Its not an assumption.

Mathematics is a universal language, we use this to predict the universe.

The periodic table exists everywhere in the universe, it is part of the building blocks of nature, there are even elements that have been predicted to be true but do not belong on our planet or in our solar system. But yet we can still synthesise them.

We are now starting to understand things at a quantum level which are not governed by every day physics, and since everything in existence is an atom, it must mean in some way we are governed by quantum physics.

Similar to the belief system that the weather is only influenced by our planet, when actual fact it is also governed by our sun and position in our solar system, the Mayans found that out.

If science was not real, then how come we have everything on this planet to survive, is that not a clue. Everything on this planet acts accordingly to its surroundings and it has always been a battle of survival, without micro organisms we would cease to exist.

People have always made assumptions that's what keeps people thinking

But science is to prove the assumption fact. If there wasn't a set of rules to follow then how did we build all the technology, it wouldn't be possible. It would mean that every piece of technology is fundamentally flawed.

Then it isn't one kind of assumption.

It's difficult to come up with examples of actual assumptions being made.

One example comes from those building climate models for Global Warming. Such models likely include a number of assumptions. From what I understand, one common assumption in those models is that we will continue to use more and more fossil fuels exponentially.

In reality, we will reach a point of peak oil and a point of peak coal. Peal oil has been predicted for some time. I read an article a couple of years ago showing a number of different scientists who study coal predicting that we will reach peak coal in about fifty years.

One thing that compounds the problem is that as the prices rise when we start to run short, we have come up with advances that help us extract more from what is left and that helps extend. If oil was $6 a gallon, we would surely have reached peak oil years ago. As it is, a growing number of major oil companies are encountering more and more trouble finding new strikes and expanding production. In some cases, production is less than what it was at their maximum.

In Global Warming, if it is true that many of the models assume that the use of fossil fuels will increase exponentially well into the distant future, they are sure to increasingly overestimate the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere in the future and will consequently overestimate the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

One reason that might be used to justify the assumptions is that we cannot possibly know what is going to happen and so the best information we have is based on what has happened in the past. After all, I readily agree that it is impossible to predict how much of the power needs could be reduced by greater efficiency and how much could be met from other sources not using fossil fuels such as wind, solar, and nuclear.

NO, that is NOT the agreed upon DEFINITION OF ASSUMPTION IN THIS THREAD, AS OBVIOUSLY NOT EVERYONE AGREES WITH IT, including me, who has already stated that clearly, and defined it before, professionally as such, here in this thread, as below.

ASSUMPTION IS SYNONYM FOR HYPOTHESIS, AND HYPOTHESIS CAN RELY ON PAST ANECDOTAL EXPERIENCES WHETHER PROVEN OR NOT for FORMULATION of Hypothesis.

Merriam AND Webster is AN authority on THAT; NOT YOU, budding journalist, or whomever or whatever, OR ME..

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assumption

The meaning of words in the common use is not necessarily the same meanings they have in the world of science. Often times the words are the same but are much more precise in science than in common language.