I think that's probably the one I was thinking of. The patterns might be a bit different for something in the habitable zone, but tide locked is still going to mean windy. Venus, for example, isn't tide locked but it does rotate very slowly. Winds on Venus reach 700 km/h.
The winds might diminish as you approach the point directly under the sun (or the one directly opposite). They might be eyes of giant, perpetual hurricanes. But most of the planet would be very windy.
Anti-space nutters always seem to judge anything space-related on whether or no we can "go there." A planet 13 light years away is a lot easier to image with practical telescopes than one 13 000 light years away.
Look, I get that you're obsessed with interstellar travel, but it ain't going to happen in your lifetime.
"I accept that I could be wrong or that my current understanding of the concept of Supersymmetry might be flawed and will need to change when more data become available or may even possibly be ruled out altogether at some point"
That's not faith.
Faith doesn't mean you believe something until something better comes along. If I really have faith that my friend is trustworthy I don't make sure he's never alone in my house, just in case. I don't turn him in to the cops after I give him my spare key and my stamp collection goes missing. And I certainly don't put up security cameras hoping to catch him stealing.
If you truly have faith in supersymmetry then your ability to do science in that area is compromised. Your faith in supersymmetry means that if evidence contradicting it was introduced you wouldn't believe that evidence (many religions have claimed at various times that even hearing contrary claims or evidence are somehow detrimental to your faith), and you certainly wouldn't try yourself to disprove it!
Religious claims can certainly be treated as a theory. Many of them can even be formulated as scientific theories, and have. For example, a double blind clinical trial was conducted to determine whether prayer was an effective therapy. Not surprisingly, it turns out not to be the case. Also not surprisingly, those findings didn't cause people to stop praying for sick people. (Interestingly, a non-double blind study, where the sick people knew they were being prayed for, found that people who were prayed for did worse than those who were not. One possible explanation was that the pressure to get better because you were being prayed for caused increased stress)
You can treat religion in general as a theory and deal with it in a way that is compatible with science, although if you do it honestly, cherished ideas like a personal god get beaten up pretty badly, pretty quickly. But faith is not compatible with science. The two are antithetical. The magic ingredient that makes science what it is, is testing (which is why I italicized it). You constantly test your beliefs and only keep (provisionally at that) the ones that pass the tests. When your faith is tested you've failed if you come out the other side having changed your mind.
That certainly is the way some religious people operate. But that's NOT the definition of faith. I don't personally believe any religious claims but I also don't think they're necessarily dangerous. But faith, and the way it's been used, is. Faith is touted by some (not all) religions as a virtue but it's only real virtuous quality seems to be a convenient mechanism to keep the flock under control. Questioning your religion or, more to the point, your priest, is a lack of faith.
The poster I replied to was trying to make a point that faith is compatible with science while religion is not. If anything it's the opposite, as you point out. Belief in a higher power is a lot more compatible with scientific thinking than faith is. The Dali Llama, the head of a religion that doesn't push faith, is famous for saying "if science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change." In contrast, fundamentalist Christians, who like to toss around the f word a lot, feel the need to attack things like teaching evolution whenever they get the chance, even though I can't really see why it makes the slightest difference to their personal religious beliefs.
Uh huh. Got an apple? Drop it. We still don't really know how that works. We've got a theory that describes what happens pretty well, the only problem is that it's incompatible with pretty much everything else we think we know. Don't think resolving that would have some practical implications? See Star Trek to get an idea of some of the things we could do if we could manipulate gravity the way we do electromagnetism.
Okay, how about something a little closer to home. If you live in New York it's quite possible that some of the electricity powering the computer you typed your message on came to you via a superconducting trunk line. That's a high temperature superconductor. While we think we mostly understand regular superconductors, we really don't understand high temperature ones. Possible practical applications? Niven talks about some in Ringworld. I'm sure you can find lots of other examples.
Of course, if you leave physics there are all kinds of things ripe for revolution, or actively undergoing it. Biology is the obvious one.
Einstein wasn't an unintentional popularizer of science. He was a Carl Sagan who also happened to make a really big discovery. Einstein wrote one of the most accessible books relativity ever published and represented science in politics, among other things.
You're comparing experimentalists and theorists. Apples and oranges.
I could just as easily say that the 1874 Venus transit expedition was an example of how big science was required in the 1800s because it was much more difficult or scientists just didn't measure up to the likes of Yang and Mills.
Experimental physics has frequently involved lots of people, throughout scientific history.
Robert Brout and François Englert; Peter Higgs and Gerald Guralnik; and C. Richard Hagen and Tom Kibble are not thousands of people. Yes, there were six of them, but their discoveries were more or less independent. Pop culture remembers Newton (as it remembers only Higgs) but Laplace was in there too.
There have been relatively few new 'fundamental' discoveries in physics, compared to refinements and increasing precision. While we are always inventing new ways to use physical laws, the laws themselves haven't changed substantially since quantum mechanics became well understood (proposed nearly 100 years ago).
Let's see... the idea of a quantum field theory, 1920's to 1950's. Quantum electrodynamics, 1950s. Gauge theory, 1950s-70s. Quantum electrodynamics, 1950s. Quantum chromodynamics, 1960s-70s+. Grand synthesis/standard model, 1970s to today.
Up until the 30s we didn't know about the neutron, which makes up about half of everything around you, including you. Until the mid to late 60s we didn't know about quarks or gluons, which actually make up almost all of everything around you. Even then we hadn't the faintest idea that we'd only discovered a third of the matter particles (well, a third of the ones we know about now. We're pretty sure there are more we haven't discovered yet).
Physics right up until the present day has been a non-stop factory of fundamental discoveries compared to other eras in history. The period between Newton and Einstein wasn't exactly devoid of progress, but it was also three hundred years.
I guess you're right though, the laws of physics haven't changed much since quantum mechanics became well understood, proposed nearly 100 years ago and last modified... well, we're still arguing about how exactly to modify them, but one of the last big revolutions requiring modification was the confirmation of neutrino mass, in 1998.
Of course, we know it's still wrong. Dark matter (probably), dark energy and the incompatibility between the standard model and general relativity means we still don't know what's going on.
The original poster's thesis is something silly that people, particularly non-scientists, have been saying for a long time, quite often right before some revolution shakes everything up. The particular example you chose to support his point is one a lot of people, including me, would choose to use to demolish it.
Science is the process of understanding, or at least generating workable knowledge, through observation, theorizing, and testing. The process of science is antithetical to faith since it requires that you test everything. You accept (and only provisionally at that) only things that have good evidence supporting them. Faith is the opposite - belief regardless of supporting, absent, or contradicting evidence.
The only way you can reconcile faith (in anything, a god, your mother, a book) is to put artificial limitations on the applicable domain of science, as you appear to do. That's fine, and people, particularly religious people, are great at doing that kind of thing. Someone can do good science and believe in whatever. But it's entirely a construction of his own psyche. If science ever does come in conflict with the artificially walled off domain, as it has repeatedly and will continue to do, the believe has to give up or revise his faith, or or give up being a scientist, at least in that area of overlap.
The theory of a personal god, for example, lacks any explanatory or predictive power whatsoever, and yet requires a great deal of complication.
Apparently there is. Kids with weird names, black or white, are at a disadvantage generally. HR managers like to interview people with names they are familiar with. And being economically disadvantaged makes you more likely to get arrested.
Ah, the laissez-faire capitalist who doesn't know enough history to know what laissez-faire capitalism involves.
Pure capitalism is nasty and doesn't work. It's been tried. It was worse than communism. Mixed economies do work (yes, the US is a mixed economy). The difference between a mixed economy and pure capitalism? Regulation, i.e. "tell[ing] private businesses what to do with their money and assets."
Reinstituting some import taxes, duties, etc. would also have the effect of decreasing the size of companies, particularly the transnational ones, and reduce the problem of corporations threatening to leave or hiding money internationally.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's probably the one I was thinking of. The patterns might be a bit different for something in the habitable zone, but tide locked is still going to mean windy. Venus, for example, isn't tide locked but it does rotate very slowly. Winds on Venus reach 700 km/h.
The winds might diminish as you approach the point directly under the sun (or the one directly opposite). They might be eyes of giant, perpetual hurricanes. But most of the planet would be very windy.
Anti-space nutters always seem to judge anything space-related on whether or no we can "go there." A planet 13 light years away is a lot easier to image with practical telescopes than one 13 000 light years away.
Look, I get that you're obsessed with interstellar travel, but it ain't going to happen in your lifetime.
Windy.
We've found some tidally locked gas giants and they have winds that make the ones on regular gas giants look light.
Physicists are pretty sure they know of several ways around that particular problem. They're just not sure whether any of them will ever be practical.
"I accept that I could be wrong or that my current understanding of the concept of Supersymmetry might be flawed and will need to change when more data become available or may even possibly be ruled out altogether at some point"
That's not faith.
Faith doesn't mean you believe something until something better comes along. If I really have faith that my friend is trustworthy I don't make sure he's never alone in my house, just in case. I don't turn him in to the cops after I give him my spare key and my stamp collection goes missing. And I certainly don't put up security cameras hoping to catch him stealing.
If you truly have faith in supersymmetry then your ability to do science in that area is compromised. Your faith in supersymmetry means that if evidence contradicting it was introduced you wouldn't believe that evidence (many religions have claimed at various times that even hearing contrary claims or evidence are somehow detrimental to your faith), and you certainly wouldn't try yourself to disprove it!
Religious claims can certainly be treated as a theory. Many of them can even be formulated as scientific theories, and have. For example, a double blind clinical trial was conducted to determine whether prayer was an effective therapy. Not surprisingly, it turns out not to be the case. Also not surprisingly, those findings didn't cause people to stop praying for sick people. (Interestingly, a non-double blind study, where the sick people knew they were being prayed for, found that people who were prayed for did worse than those who were not. One possible explanation was that the pressure to get better because you were being prayed for caused increased stress)
You can treat religion in general as a theory and deal with it in a way that is compatible with science, although if you do it honestly, cherished ideas like a personal god get beaten up pretty badly, pretty quickly. But faith is not compatible with science. The two are antithetical. The magic ingredient that makes science what it is, is testing (which is why I italicized it). You constantly test your beliefs and only keep (provisionally at that) the ones that pass the tests. When your faith is tested you've failed if you come out the other side having changed your mind.
That certainly is the way some religious people operate. But that's NOT the definition of faith. I don't personally believe any religious claims but I also don't think they're necessarily dangerous. But faith, and the way it's been used, is. Faith is touted by some (not all) religions as a virtue but it's only real virtuous quality seems to be a convenient mechanism to keep the flock under control. Questioning your religion or, more to the point, your priest, is a lack of faith.
The poster I replied to was trying to make a point that faith is compatible with science while religion is not. If anything it's the opposite, as you point out. Belief in a higher power is a lot more compatible with scientific thinking than faith is. The Dali Llama, the head of a religion that doesn't push faith, is famous for saying "if science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change." In contrast, fundamentalist Christians, who like to toss around the f word a lot, feel the need to attack things like teaching evolution whenever they get the chance, even though I can't really see why it makes the slightest difference to their personal religious beliefs.
Hoverboards. Sheesh.
Uh huh. Got an apple? Drop it. We still don't really know how that works. We've got a theory that describes what happens pretty well, the only problem is that it's incompatible with pretty much everything else we think we know. Don't think resolving that would have some practical implications? See Star Trek to get an idea of some of the things we could do if we could manipulate gravity the way we do electromagnetism.
Okay, how about something a little closer to home. If you live in New York it's quite possible that some of the electricity powering the computer you typed your message on came to you via a superconducting trunk line. That's a high temperature superconductor. While we think we mostly understand regular superconductors, we really don't understand high temperature ones. Possible practical applications? Niven talks about some in Ringworld. I'm sure you can find lots of other examples.
Of course, if you leave physics there are all kinds of things ripe for revolution, or actively undergoing it. Biology is the obvious one.
Einstein wasn't an unintentional popularizer of science. He was a Carl Sagan who also happened to make a really big discovery. Einstein wrote one of the most accessible books relativity ever published and represented science in politics, among other things.
You're comparing experimentalists and theorists. Apples and oranges.
I could just as easily say that the 1874 Venus transit expedition was an example of how big science was required in the 1800s because it was much more difficult or scientists just didn't measure up to the likes of Yang and Mills.
Experimental physics has frequently involved lots of people, throughout scientific history.
Robert Brout and François Englert; Peter Higgs and Gerald Guralnik; and C. Richard Hagen and Tom Kibble are not thousands of people. Yes, there were six of them, but their discoveries were more or less independent. Pop culture remembers Newton (as it remembers only Higgs) but Laplace was in there too.
Let's see... the idea of a quantum field theory, 1920's to 1950's. Quantum electrodynamics, 1950s. Gauge theory, 1950s-70s. Quantum electrodynamics, 1950s. Quantum chromodynamics, 1960s-70s+. Grand synthesis/standard model, 1970s to today.
Up until the 30s we didn't know about the neutron, which makes up about half of everything around you, including you. Until the mid to late 60s we didn't know about quarks or gluons, which actually make up almost all of everything around you. Even then we hadn't the faintest idea that we'd only discovered a third of the matter particles (well, a third of the ones we know about now. We're pretty sure there are more we haven't discovered yet).
Physics right up until the present day has been a non-stop factory of fundamental discoveries compared to other eras in history. The period between Newton and Einstein wasn't exactly devoid of progress, but it was also three hundred years.
I guess you're right though, the laws of physics haven't changed much since quantum mechanics became well understood, proposed nearly 100 years ago and last modified... well, we're still arguing about how exactly to modify them, but one of the last big revolutions requiring modification was the confirmation of neutrino mass, in 1998.
Of course, we know it's still wrong. Dark matter (probably), dark energy and the incompatibility between the standard model and general relativity means we still don't know what's going on.
The original poster's thesis is something silly that people, particularly non-scientists, have been saying for a long time, quite often right before some revolution shakes everything up. The particular example you chose to support his point is one a lot of people, including me, would choose to use to demolish it.
The GP's quote was supposedly (it wasn't actually) uttered by a patent commissioner closer to 1890 than to 1990.
Science is the process of understanding, or at least generating workable knowledge, through observation, theorizing, and testing. The process of science is antithetical to faith since it requires that you test everything. You accept (and only provisionally at that) only things that have good evidence supporting them. Faith is the opposite - belief regardless of supporting, absent, or contradicting evidence.
The only way you can reconcile faith (in anything, a god, your mother, a book) is to put artificial limitations on the applicable domain of science, as you appear to do. That's fine, and people, particularly religious people, are great at doing that kind of thing. Someone can do good science and believe in whatever. But it's entirely a construction of his own psyche. If science ever does come in conflict with the artificially walled off domain, as it has repeatedly and will continue to do, the believe has to give up or revise his faith, or or give up being a scientist, at least in that area of overlap.
The theory of a personal god, for example, lacks any explanatory or predictive power whatsoever, and yet requires a great deal of complication.
Apparently there is. Kids with weird names, black or white, are at a disadvantage generally. HR managers like to interview people with names they are familiar with. And being economically disadvantaged makes you more likely to get arrested.
Even if that's true, it's still a problem.
If they're completely harmless how can you overdose?
Only if it's blended scotch. There is definitely something wrong with putting good scotch in coffee. Or anything else for that matter.
All those substances are likely to have some nasty effects short of killing you if you take a high enough (but sublethal) dose.
French press Kona coffee... Nothing. The swill that comes out of the machine at work? Whiskey.
Dropping half a cup of sugar in your coffee would probably have some effect too, don't you think?
Were you just saving that HFCS rant up and this was the best opening you got?
Stallman is crazy, and a zealot. He does have good ideas sometimes though, if they're implemented by people with more moderate temperaments.
Ah, the laissez-faire capitalist who doesn't know enough history to know what laissez-faire capitalism involves.
Pure capitalism is nasty and doesn't work. It's been tried. It was worse than communism. Mixed economies do work (yes, the US is a mixed economy). The difference between a mixed economy and pure capitalism? Regulation, i.e. "tell[ing] private businesses what to do with their money and assets."
Reinstituting some import taxes, duties, etc. would also have the effect of decreasing the size of companies, particularly the transnational ones, and reduce the problem of corporations threatening to leave or hiding money internationally.
That's what the large array of foreign trade taxes are for.