OT: Engineers, geologists, and the Mars rover Curiosity

Please provide a quotation from a scientist to the effect that "science is not in the business of proving facts". I suspect that you have misunderstood something.

What facts do you believe keep getting changed?

Again you claim that science does not observe facts. But you have not provided any information to support your argument.

Scientific fact: Water is moving past rocks at a differential velocity of x meters per second +/- y estimated inaccuracy in the measurement.

Scientific hypothesis: Water is falling down the rocks.

Now science performs addition experiments to determine whether water is falling down the rocks.

Actually your phrasing is more typical of a high school philosophy class than anything in science.

Please provide an example.

Google "term of art". "Theory" in science does not mean any of the things that you include in your definition. "Theory" in science means a descriptive model that allows predictions to be made, which predictions have come true every time they have been tested.

Please provide an example of a case in science in which the majority won and the model was accepted event though it was falsified by observation.

You are conflating science and scientists. Individual scientists believe many things. Sometimes they believe things that are wrong or untrue. Sometimes they are persuaded to alter those beliefs, sometimes they aren't. However science is a process by which wrong beliefs get systematically rejected. That doesn't necessarily happen instantly, and for an anomalous result to be accepted it has to be replicated by different researchers in different facilities.

Precision in experimental science is a number. An experiment is accurate to a certain precision.

If one thousand researchers do something and get exactly the same result, and one does the same thing and gets a different result, odds are that he didn't do the same thing, he just thought he did.

It's not proof that anything is wrong with the model until multiple researchers doing the same thing as the one who got the anomalous result get the same anomalous result.

If there have been 10,000 tests giving 3e8 meters/second and one that gives 1 meter per second, then it is reasonable to believe that the 1 experiment had some kind of problem. If there have been a a million tests and 100 of them by different scientists all give 1 meter per hour, now it is time to start trying to figure out what is wrong with our models.

The only faith involved in science is the faith that the universe is comprehensible. Everything else is based on measurement and observation.

As for what is taught in school, the schoobooks have to be acceptable to both California and Texas, which makes them effectively content-free. If school is teaching that we believe science by faith then school is teaching lies.

You're quibbling now over meaningless distinctions.

A point comes where you have to trust the other guy to know what he's doing you know. Do you think that in order for a physician to trust the results from an MRI he should be able to construct the machine himself from scratch? There is too much human knowledge at this time for one person to master in a lifetime.

However if there is a point in science that you disagree with, go research it. Nobody is hiding it from you or telling you that you may not read the literature. If you find that the research is in error, write up your observations in the form of a paper and submit it to Physical Review Letters and if your argument makes any sense to the peer-revievers they will likely publish it. On the other hand, most people who find that science is in error don't understand what they are criticizing and their criticism get rejected as the work of crackpots, which leads to them putting up web sites about how they were persecuted.

The trouble is that you can't research a point of science for free on the Internet. The journals charge for copies of papers, even electronic ones, so if you don't have library access you can easily go broke.

Yes, we do. Most people don't have the time to fix their own car or their own roof or their own pipe and are interested in other things, so they hire experts. One is not obligated to do so--the last time I hired an expert to do anything it was a roofer and that was because the roof had a hole in it and I was recovering from surgery at the time (another expert).

Yes, it does.

Try living without it for a month and see if you still think it doens't work.

We have an unprecedented degree of power over the physical world, because we have science. If it doesn't work then explain how that happened.

Yes, engineers make mistakes and people get killed. That's not because the science is wrong, it's because a human didn't apply it properly.

Give us one example of people being killed because a well established scientific model was in error.

The Navier-Stokes equations, which are the ones that are used to analyze the operation of aicraft wings, were first discovered in 1822. The first heavier than air flight was in 1906. So the science was there before the airplane was.

And I don't know where you get the idea that the airplane was invfented by people who were not scientists. It wasn't found under a rock you know, the Wrights developed and tested every part of it, failed many times, and learned from their failures. Their approach was entirely that of experimental science. You seem to think that the only scientists in the world are people with doctorates and white lab coats. A great deal of science has been done by people who had neither.

Which prehistoric man was this? The only example of "prehistoric man" in which a pig was involved was the London newspapers running an article that the original researcher though laughable based on his announcement of the possible discovery of a New World ape.

Actually science never accepted it, gullible journalists looking for a story did and lied about it.

Don't assume that what the newspapers say about science is correct. Most of it is wrong.

How is that a response to the many cases in which scientific models were invalidated by new facts with the result that more complete and accurate models arose?

What other theories do you believe that quantum theory "relies on"?

There is no scientific theory called "trajectory". One uses mechanics to calculate trajectories.

It would help if you provided sources so that one can have a hope of figuring out what you are raving about.

Not if there is already an established model that puts them there without one.

You're conflating theory and observation again. There are features on Mars that look very much like features on Earth that were caused by running water. The null hypothesis is that the ones on Mars had the same cause. Either that hypothesis will be falsified or it won't. Time will tell. Research involving another planet is a slow process--you can't just jump in the Land Rover and drive out there and start making measurements.

And yet you've done just that by rejecting science.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1947 in Everson v. Board of Education that it does apply to the states.

"Neither a state nor the federal government can set up a religion. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can they force...a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will, or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion."

-- Doug

None of which forbids a person from exercising free expression of his religious beliefs while in any official capacity as a government employee. But they'll sure try to stop you from doing so.

OK...thanks ...good job...way to go...atta boy .... sit ....stay.

Now...how the hell are we gonna get that thing back here ?

Science is not in the business of proving facts. Science doesn't prove, it only disproves. If enough attempts to disprove something fail, that something is believed to be true. Always subject to some successful attempt to disprove it.

Nonsense. One test is never proof of anything. One test is evidence in support of a theory or evidence against the theory (or hypothesis).

Science is indeed a faith in that it is anchored in beliefs that cannot be proven. Roughly, these are:

Yep. Our world is too complex for everyone to know everything. It has been that way for centuries.

You are looking for perfection in a human endeavor? Good luck.

The Wright brothers were pretty damn fine scientists. Great inventors, too. They discovered that Lilienthal's aerodynamic data was just plain wrong and did the research needed to get it right.

That's the great thing about science. Anybody can say it is wrong. Don't expect to be taken seriously unless you have data to back you up.

-- Doug

Which the founders would have looked on with horror seeing as to how the primary reason for the establishment clause was to ensure those states that had state religions that the Federal government would not interfere with those state religions.

Whoa, you're making the same mistake he is. Science is very interested in determining facts such as the mass of the Earth or the velocity of light or the permeability of free space. The thing is though, a scientist wouldn't say that he had "proven" one of these facts, he would say that he had "measured" it.

Theory on the other hand is not fact, and is valid only to the extent that its predictions agree with established facts.

That the acceleration of gravity on the surface of the earth is approximately 9.8 meters per second is a fact. No new discoveries are going to change that.

The theory that gravitation is an inverse-square force on the other hand, is subject to change as improved models are developed--it's not going to change much mind you but it could change some.

Yep.

Whoa again! Might be that some of your hard core facts are slightly off...

Better yet, prove that they are actually there. There was small news comment on my news source, it showed a pictured of the "Mars" landscape with a shadow of what appeared to be a human head and shoulders. I guess they did not notice that the guy taking the picture had his shadow in it.

You have apparently have not watched the news in the last 50 years if you think facts can not be changed. ;~)

We may be playing games over the definition of "fact". It is not a word often used in the scientific community. But if a fact cannot change, then 9.8 m/s is fact only for sufficiently large values of "approximately".

That value was found to be different at the poles than equator because the earth is not a sphere. Later, it was found to vary because of uneven distribution of mass in the earth. I'm sure there are other variations.

The point is that even well-established observations are subject to revision based on new data, just like theories.

-- Doug

They found it the due process clause of the 14th amendment. I very glad they did. Government intrusion into a matter as personal as religious beliefs is a particularly egregious form of government intrusion. Federal, state, or local.

The founding fathers had many inclinations. Each of the 55 delegates to the Federal Convention had their own inclinations. Each of the members of the state legislators that ratified it had theirs. You don't have to read very far in history to realize they often disagreed.

I'll agree completely they had no political ability to impose the establishment clause on the states. But they did put some controls on the states. The commerce, full faith and credit, and supremacy clauses come to mind.

-- Doug

Fine, it is a fact that the acceleration of gravity on the surface of the Earth is somewhere between 9 and 11 meters per second squared.

Do you think that any new discovery is going to alter that?

And next time someone says "approximately" don't waste everybody's time quibbling over how approximately.

My apologies. I didn't mean to quibble over "approximately", I meant to riff on it. My core point was that anything in science is subject to change based on new data. Otherwise, it is not science, it is dogma.

I think you are saying some things are very well established and unlikely to be changed. Agreed. But when it happens, it can take us to very interesting places.

-- Doug

Due process. What a laugh. I'm sure a hater like you does think it's a good idea to limit religious freedom.

The fact is that they agreed on the First. They would *NOT* have, if it took away a power the states had already claimed.

What's funny? The original intent of the 14th amendment author, Ohio Representative John Bingham was to extend the Bill of Rights to the states. It was passed with that intent . It took the Supremes a long time to get around to applying it.

Name calling? Do you have any better points to make than that?

Everything I've said is in favor of religious freedom. Unless you define religious freedom as state sponsored/imposed religion.

-- Doug

I don't consider forbidding schoolteachers to discuss religion with students to be either state sponsored/imposed religion or relgious freedom.

Note that I am an atheist.

Ok, that's YOUR religion.

Why force it on innocent kids?