Slashdot Mirror
Plasma Plants Vaporize Trash While Creating Energy
Jason Sahler writes "Recently St. Lucie County in Florida announced that it has teamed up with Geoplasma to develop the United States' first plasma gasification plant. The plant will use super-hot 10,000 degree Fahrenheit plasma to effectively vaporize 1,500 tons of trash each day, which in turn spins turbines to generate 60MW of electricity — enough to power 50,000 homes!"
yai, though. :)
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Because nobody understands even 0.1% of science (rather there are millions of people that each understand their 0.00002%), and therefore they have to defer judgement to someone else on almost everything. The real scientific answer to any question outside of that 0.00002% is "I don't know" and for the rest it should be mentioned that there's some degree of doubt involved, necessary for the advancement of science).
Since both the smartest and the dumbest of people can't construct a correct opinion themselves, they simply don't do that.
Some people defer judgement to priests, who are declared experts by some institution, claiming to have a good grasp of reality.
Some people defer judgement to "experts", who are declared experts by some institution, claiming to have a good grasp of reality.
There is however one tiny detail that is often overlooked : "experts" often disagree amongst eachother, and for most disagreements there is no money or will to do an experiment (or the experiment is impossible, or unethical, as is often the case in psychology. Or the result of the experiment is politically incorrect, like for example that video games really do increase the likelihood of violent behavior, which is more than proven). And then "experts" who are politicians in a flimsy disguise* join the fray and make the confusion complete.
Of course 50 years ago the same happened with priests.
And of course politics, in the form of grant money and otherwise (friends, family, blackmail) tends to permeate actual experts (*and* obviously actual priests) too. Let's take again global warming. Nobody's done the experiment, and so there is quite a margin of doubt (for example, the current winter is WAY colder than the models predicted), which can not be resolved (we can't create a second earth and put all co2 on one of them), so we'll always have imprecise and inaccurate models, that can never be proven to be correct or incorrect. And confidence intervals assigned to them have proven to be simply wrong more than just once.
* Example : You can think what you will of Al Gore, but he's no climatologist. He himself, is not capable of evaluating the likelihood of the anthropogenic global warming theory (and given his electricity bill and car park, his actual evaluation of it's truth is quite clear and not what you'd want to see). Therefore people who defer judgement to him, and there sure are a lot of them, are equally stupid as people who defer judgement to the 3 daughters of allah, and offer some virgins to seal the deal.
Of course there remains the issue that you actually need to form an opinion (well I suppose you don't absolutely need to, but as slashdot illustrates, everybody seems more than happy to do so). And there is no source of only correct information. It's not even the case that the "average" opinion is correct (for example, the average opinion of the 6 billion humans alive is still that God created man, and evolution's a load of crap).
In the very best case, your average correct opinion comes from someone whom you have no reasonable reason to trust, whom you cannot seriously believe is necessarily right. So does your average wrong opinion. Potentially not even from a different person.
So in reality you're merely pretending that this is a trivial problem because you "know you're right". In truth, if you're truly an expert at your field (unlikely), you are "right" about 0.00002% of science, all the rest is mere belief, most of it plainly wrong, or at best inaccurate.
So it's not at all a trivial problem. There used to be the opinion that one should simply do the experiment oneself, or at least witness one and check it's correctness, which was perhaps possible in the time of Newton, but is not at all realistic today. Therefore there is no real "certain" way to discern scientific truth from scientific frauds anymore.
About the "scientific consensus" : for starters, that is a very ill-defined concept. Second, the scientific consensus was once that the titanic was unsin