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Neutrinos, Muons and the Standard Model
scorp1us writes: "I can't believe I haven't seen this posted yet. Apparently experiments in particle physics aren't holding to theory. The result: a search for a new form of energy or matter. Read about it in the Post. No wonder witches weigh as much as a duck."
All science is based on "educated guesses." It's just that some guesses are much more educated than others, and turn out to fit the facts pretty well. Relativity is one of those very good guesses, along with Newton's laws (and no, Einstein didn't replace Newton, just refined Newtonian physics in a small but significant way), Darwinian evolution, plate tectonics, Boyle's law, etc. ...
But this is the defining characteristic of science: everything, always, is open to question. Hypotheses that are borne out by experiment and observation turn into theories, and those theories which stand the test of time are honored by being called laws, but none of them are "facts" in the sense that they can't be proven wrong. This is the principle of falsifiability, and it is the one thing which sets science apart from religion, philosophy, law, and other areas of human intellectual endeavor which seek to make statements about our world.
So relativity isn't a "hard fact." Neither is gravity. But that gravity, and relativity, and evolution, and plate tectonics, et bloody cetera, will operate the way the theories say they will, is the way to bet unless and until something dramatically better -- and by "better" I mean "backed by lots of reproducible evidence" -- comes along.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Hold onto that thought, 'cause I'm about to blow a Mack truck-sized hole in it.
Do a google search on Alfred Wegener, and you'll see a guy who got his ass kicked all over the place for proposing a theory that contradicted scientific understanding at the time. And was harassed as vigorously as any religious heretic. Want more? Here's the frigging link.
Through the hoop, nothin' but net.
Do yourself a favor and check out Science's reaction to Darwin and doubters of Global Warning. Shocking behaviour all around, if you ask me.
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
What the hell, I'll answer it, AC post or not.
There are two reasons. The first is that evolution is uniquely under attack -- there are cranks who attack relativity, plate tectonics, and other major, well-supported scientific theories (in fact, I'd go so far as to call all of these "laws") but few of them have the numbers or the potential power the creationists do. So Dawkins, quite understandably, feels defensive.
Second, without exception, creationists fail to mount a scientific attack on evolution. They either just say it contradicts the Bible and so must be false (the old school) or they use pseudo-scientific language and deliberate misrepresentation of scientific evidence (the new school.) What they don't do is attack the theory the way real scientists attack a theory, with hard evidence, because they don't have any.
But the new-school creationists have very good PR, and an amazing number of otherwise rational people are fooled by their rhetoric into thinking that "evidence against evolution" actually exists. This, of course, gets Dawkins' goat. And although I think his "undisguised clarity" may be a bit counterproductive, the more dangerous creationism gets, the more I find myself in sympathy with his outspoken exasperation.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If you try to tell me that rocks fall up, you will need a lot better evidence than if you try to tell me that rocks fall down. This is a surprise?
... was it the early 1960s? ... thermal plumes were detected in the magma. Prior to that evidence had been accumulating, and people would periodically go back to the continental drift theory (I read about one of those in Science Digest), but every time it got dropped because there wasn't any mechanism, even though it would have explained a lot, and everyone knew that it would have explained a lot. Withing a few years of the discovery of the mechanism, the theory surfaced again. And this time it was accepted.
It it proper that unexpectable results demand a higher standard of proof. For many statements I don't require any proof at all. After all, I already believe them independantly. But if you try to tell me that Bill Gates invented the computer, then I will need quite a lot of evidence that I can personally check fairly easily before I even consider the idea seriously.
And the more time and effort I have put into learning (or creating) something, the less willing I am for someone else to blythly say "O, didn't you know that turtles can fly?", and the less willing I am to listen to that as other than fantasy (I had no objection when Terry Pratchett used that theme).
So when someone says that continents dance, it takes a good deal of evidence. Wegener didn't have it. He had an idea. It was an interesting idea, and matched a few geographic features. I made the same guess in grade school, though I didn't publish a paper about it. But all I had was an idea, and that's about all that Wegener had. His was more developed, but he didn't have any mechanism. He looked and couldn't find it. Neither could anyone else who was interested, until
Theories recognized as incomplete won't get accepted over current theories, even when the current theories are also known to be incomplete. Sorry, there are good reasons. There are also bad reasons, but there are a lot of good reasons, which mainly add up to "Why should I bother to learn a new bad idea to replace an old bad idea." It's too much work for no gain.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.