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The Milky Way is Not a Spiral?
ETEQ writes "Space.com reports that new data from the Spitzer Space Telescope showing that the Milky Way is in fact a barred spiral! Looks like all our old astronomy textbooks will have to be thrown away..."
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The evidence they found tells us that this MAY be a barred spiral galaxy, it is not yet, theres just good strong evidence that could lead to a barred-sprial conclusion.
Cogito Eggo Sum, I think therefore I'm a waffle
Looks like all our old astronomy textbooks will have to be thrown away...
Which happens every year at the university level anyway, where a new 'edition' comes out every year with one or two pages slightly modified, but you have to buy the new one for $150 since the questions and homework study in the appendix are completely different. No, I'm not bitter that the fall semester is coming or anything.
Not exactly a "revelation"- I learned that the Milky Way was a barred spiral in a Slashdot story three years ago.
> Well the actual problem is people on both sides. First you have one group who believes that science is actual truth, and that all the problems in the world can be fixed with science.
I suspect that most scientists actually believe that science is an attempt to get at the truth, and will likely never be complete. And that only some problems can be fixed with science.
> Religion on the other hand is more of a combined study where you put together many different studies and look at the truth as a whole
Actually, religion looks at mythology and people's opinions about theology, morals, the proper social order, and the existence of a lot of unevidenced supernatural stuff.
> The main difference is science is trying to constantly disprove itself while religion is trying to prove itself. They are not opposing forces just different methods of trying to find truth.
Religion, most often, merely attempts to maintain traditional beliefs and values. Those who are "trying to find truth" usually get kicked out of the club, because truth is rarely deferential to traditional beliefs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Arguments from incredulity may satisfy your faith, but in the pursuit of knowledge, they're in fact worse than useless.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What a load of blather. Science is simply a way of attempting to explain observed data and make predictions upon it. It isn't a religion any more than hammers or toothpicks are religion. Maybe some misguided souls who likely don't understand science think of it in that fashion, but science is a methodology, a means of determing provisional explanations. Have you ever heard of a religion that says "to the best evidence we have to date is explained by , but we await more data"?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A parsec means nothing to me. A lightyear on the other hand means a lot. If it takes 8 minutes for light to reach earth from the sun, then I can kind of, sort of imagine how far away 27000 lightyears is.
> This has been precisely my argument in favor of Intelligent Design. Evolution could have been the product of the creator stacking the dominoes so the right tap made it all happen. Evolution and the Big Bang may have been the implementation of "the Design."
FYI, that's not an argument in favor of ID. It's merely an argument that ID could be framed in such a way that it would not be in conflict with the known facts.
Unicorn Theory can also be framed in such a way that it is not in conflict with the known facts, but an argument in favor of UT is another matter altogether.
And that's precisely the problem with ID. When you analyze their arguments and spot them for the bunkum that they are, you're left without any reason to believe in ID. That's not a proof that no IDer exists, but it leaves ID in the same category as UT, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, PSI power, and other stuff that some people believe in without any evidence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Strawman to the nth degree.
Your comment reveals a profound ignorance of what science is about. Anyone who believes science reveals truth doesn't understand science. Science is the search for fact. not truth. As Indiana Jones memorably said,
Furthermore, the purpose of science isn't to "solve problems"; it is the search for fact.
And ever since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment displacing Rationalism in the 18th century, science never seeks to prove anything. In science you can disprove, but you cannot prove because of the principle of skepticism. So the statement "if science can't 100% prove it, other theories are fair game" makes no sense at all.
The purpose of science is the search for fact. Science is the study of the natural world. Religion and philosophy are there to provide commentary on and understanding of the human condition. From that perspective, they have nothing to do with each other and should not be mixed.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Astronomy texts as recent as 40 years old still mention the Marias on the Moon to be ancient seas (though some scoff at the idea that they currently hold water, how preposterous); how the dark areas on Mars are the result of vegetation, and yet made humour about how people used to think there was intelligent life there; green stars, especially the green companion of Antares when there are no green stars; etc. Interestingly they DO mention planet X since they were still searching for it while most recent astronomy books had given up on the search for planet X. Now it seems we've found planet X after all, and even bigger than we thought after we discovered the IR telescope had the wrong target.
Going back further, astronomy books thought galaxies were nebulae, just puffs of gas and dust within our galaxy. Just like we originally thought that ours was the only solar system, it was not that long ago that we thought our galaxy was the only one. Soon perhaps the idea of just one universe will sound silly to us...
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
If you think about it, 1850 that wasn't too long ago. It seems that humanity has been full of sh%t for most of history.
We still are. 100 years from now, they will laugh at us for our crazy notions about strings, chaos, and the human genome.
Science is not, and never has been, about being right. It's about trying to find predictive models of the universe which you can rely on most of the time.
The most advanced concepts of science will most likely sound as silly as "turtles, all the way down" to people a couple generations in the future, but they are still incredibly valuable to us today.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This is a major theme of the book and PBS series The Day the Universe Changed. It's all to easy to look back in history and think that our ancestors had ridiculous beliefs. But it's also easy to forget what we perceive isn't reality, but our own interpretation of what we get from our senses, which is filtered by our personal beliefs and biases. What we think is real is often an elaborate hallucination that often has little or no bearing to actual reality.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Call me old fashioned but I believe that when you find evidence that invalidates or modifies a theory, you REVISE your text book instead of throwing it away. I don't really think we want to throw away the entire body of astronomical evidence over this one. Apart from that policy putting the human race back quite a bit, that'd upset me quite a bit given that I spent 2 1/2 years studying astronomy.
Besides you don't want to set a precedent for your cowboy president to throw away all books on evolution because some small flaw is found in one part of the theory.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer