The only religion that science ever threatens is one which claims scientific proof. Those religions which claim such things (or claim things which contradict the findings of science) can be scientifically disproven. This is why the mainstream Christian Church (for example) has moved steadily away from any areas covered by science over the centuries. The grounds of the two schools of thought is, at a basic level, now entirely separate. A rational theist can only claim that they choose to believe, and science has no argument about people's choices about intangibles, really.
The Roman Catholic Church took the opposite tack- back in Vatican I we saw the culmination of the Scholastic Theological school of thought, and admitted that which can be scientifically disproven, is false. Instead of moving steadily away- the Vatican started funding observatories and archaeological digs, universities and scientists, in an attempt to follow that original, grand idea of science- to find a way to know God beyond scriptures, beyond revelations, to find the mind of God in God's works. The helmet in TFA gives us the most interesting example of a *repeatable* way to gain personal revelation- one of the most subjective things about religion, faith, just became objective, repeatable, and falsifiable.
I'd disagree with that. The belief in #1 follows from #2, but is in now way proven thereby. Proof requires evidence, whilst #2 provides faith which is necessary to reach the interpretation required to believe #1. Proof and faith are very different things.
#2 isn't just faith- it is empirical research. It's the experience of the experiment. The fact that up until now it wasn't repeatable made it subjective evidence, but even subjective evidence is still evidence. Now that it is OBJECTIVE evidence, #2 becomes proof.
Thanks for the book recommendation, but I shall pass for now. There are many scriptural and philosophical writings.. but the fact that the scientific community doesn't yet recognize prayer as a valid mechanism for affecting the physical world suggests strongly to me that the arguments in the book will not be conclusive.
Well, that would more tell me that the "scientific community" is being willfully ignorant- choosing their data to fit a predetermined conclusion. The fact that you choose to pass based on the predetermined conclusion is strong evidence for such a theory. However, it occurs to me that an alternate theory would be that you've confined the "physical world" to the five human senses, maybe expanded by that technology which can convert other forces and items to that which is discernible by our five human senses. In which case I'd say you're looking at a rather narrow slice of the universe, and choosing to be willfully ignorant of the effect of prayer on the human mind directly.
Beautifully written, I'm sure, but almost certainly much the same as the other philosophical and/or rhetorical arguments which I have heard from members of various religions - none of which offer any testable hypothesis, I'm afraid.
Oh, the Tibetan Book of the Dead offers testable hypothesis. You have to die to test them, but that's not exactly a hard thing to come back from the dead these days, so it's not exactly impossible to complete the experiments. People come back from the dead all the time thanks to modern technology. It was a rare occurrence during the millenia it took to write that book, though.
I'd point out that you'd need fewer of them in this use as you're not going for mechanical strength beyond supporting the cable itself. No need to have it strong enough to support say, a self-powered elevator.
Your first is not anything like proof of existence of a deity. It's proof of a natural process and of non-random laws. As far as I know, science has not yet discovered how the universe was created. Can you provide a reference?
In fact, to the rational theologist, the ONLY threat science offers to faith is the random nature of quantum physics. *ALL* else, to the rational theologist, is just another scripture, another look at the mind of God from a different perspective. Of course, the rational theologist isn't threatened by competing religions anymore either- except the irrational ones of course. A random, indeterministic universe where at the quantum level the best we can do is probability and a random, unknowable Diety that commands us not to kill one day and to kill every Kufar the next; both of these are equally threatening to the rational theologist.
I don't see the link between your second statement and science.
Then you need to RTFA! The whole point is that the experience of the spiritual is no longer a haphazard experience involving fasting, prayer, meditation and hallucinogenic drugs. It's now a repeatable experiment. From my own theological background- 'tis a pity Mother Theresa failed to live to this day, we could have ended her long dark tea-time of the soul that had persisted for the last 50 years of her life.
Perhaps I misunderstood your claim that science has proven both your points, and that these points in some way support the hypothesis that there is a deity or deities. Could you elaborate?
All of the evidence we've ever had of God, that any theologian has ever had of God, has been 1) His Works and 2) Personal, subjective experience of God. #1 is easily provable to the man who has had #2. But without #2, it's impossible to prove #1. This is the challenge atheism has always presented- how to give people #2. And the answer WAS, you can't. Until now. Now we have a repeatable way to give people #2. Irrational Faith is no longer required- Rational Faith can be proven.
While you're at it, can you please provide a reference for this as well? In all credible double-blind tests I've ever read about, prayer was shown to have no effect whatsoever.
Depends on what you're looking at prayer to DO. In this case, there's a scientific document that you need to read: This work of Eastern science took several thousand years to write, and is far more credible than anything else I've ever seen on the topic of exploring connections to the divine (especially the connection at the point of death). Several thousand case studies went into it.
Unlike the irrational faiths- the rational theologist doesn't throw out subjective evidence merely because it is SUBJECTIVE.
That's the extreme weak form of faith- irrational faith, to paraphrase Pope Benedict. Of course, a lot of priests and nuns in Islamic countries paid the ultimate price for the Pope to say that (it was the same speech that he quoted a 10th century Byzantine Emperor's opinion about Islam as an example of irrational faith).
Rational faith *MUST* accept scientific fact.....
It doesn't answer the question at all, and I'm surprised by your logical fallacy.
Maybe because I'm not a fundamentalist- and I don't hold to a fundamentalist definition of "God".
God is two things to me, and both have been proven by science. The first is that there was a process that created our natural laws and our universe; those laws are not random. The second is the "personal God"- the feeling of the presence of the divine that causes human beings to do community-inspired acts of goodness. This is absolute proof of the second.
Just because stimulating the brain a certain way gives an experience comparable to the "presence of God" doesn't mean that that's the only way you can feel the presence of God. You can extract certain compounds and use them to convince someone he is smelling violets, or roses or food, but that doesn't mean every time he smells those things it's only because someone is spraying those compounds in the air. It could be because those things (violets, roses, food) are really present.
Uh, yes, so what? Just because we can explain a miracle does not make it any less of a miracle. The fact that we now have a more repeatable way to stimulate the same areas of the brain that fasting and prayer do, does not negate that fasting and prayer *also* work.
Furthermore, as a religious person who believes in God, I've never experienced the sensation of a presence in that way. I believe God is there, but it doesn't seem He's chosen that way to reveal Himself to me.
Well, the variety of stimuli is immense- and not all work for all people. Perhaps you've just failed to find the situation that works for you. But now, thanks to science, you don't have to find a situation that works for you- this helmet works for *EVERYBODY*.
I'm sure that someone will prove why the helmet proves the existence of God, as this helmet is really just a divine cellphone.
Or rather, at least a mimicing of other, lesser forms of divine cellphone: fasting, hallucinogenic drugs, etc.
I'm also sure that someone will say the helmet strengthens their faith, as it makes them just have to redouble their efforts to maintain their delusion.
What delusion? What delusion would be left? If in fact what we've got is a *repeatable* divine cellphone, then anybody can "experience God", or what the religious have always called God- thus God becomes a *fact*, not a delusion.
God is the ultimate Anonymous Coward -- he has infinite ability, but uses it to hide from our scientific tests with mathematical certitude.
Except now, given this invention, we now have the ability to summon Him with mathematical certitude. Kind of destroys the whole need for faith, doesn't it?
Doesn't a cruise missile imply some form of direction control? Despite the separating S-foils, I see no direction control on this thing. It's a BALLISTIC missile.
Hey, if you like supporting a lack of human rights and like being a traitor to your neighbors, go ahead- but remember that your own job is supported by the consumers that you're putting out of work.
Best for minimizing cost going to China is http://www.unionbuiltpc.com/home.php, their laptop sources American made parts first, free world parts second, Chinese parts last.
What do you mean by "everything". Do you mean I should add an apendix where I copy the entry for "explicit" from Webster's?
Nah, just link to it.
What the heck is the "peer review system" you talk about? What in hell are "pay-to-read studies"? What's an study, after all? Is it the same one of those on Nature than the review the "Apocalypsers of the Seven Day of the Return of the Beast" give me for free in the middle of the street?
True enough- I should have linked to my definitions.
Just to express this cleanly: here you just tried to "plain talk" about a certain non-technical common-sense issue. But even then, your two paragrahps are full of non-trivial asumptions and non-referenced assertions (do you *really* think any layman will understand i.e. what the peer-review system is and why it's any better than an authority-based assertion?) and still you expect that on really very especialized fields any technical article can go on all-explicit? I published some scientific papers back on my day... do you really mean I should add to my ten pages article the more than 1000 pages from the Strassburger's book on Botanics that backed them up (among others)? Or else, how do you expect for a layman to understand what do I mean when I talk about i.e. "cormophyte vs spermaphyte biological selection understanding by means of echotopic adherence function"?
My whole argument with mathematics as it is taught in the United States is that it is taught backwards. I didn't really understand the axioms of basic computation until I took Numerical Methods- a senior year undergraduate class that should have been taught to six year olds. If we did, the rest would all fall into place.
Having said that, I disagree on the purpose of journal articles- to me the purpose of journal articles is to transmit knowledge from scientists to engineers. And then, yes, I expect any relevant assumption or axiom to at least be linked to. It doesn't need a full explanation, just a "click here if you don't understand"- and that pointer can lead to a textbook that contains the material.
The idea that someone can not reproduce evidence to support a study, especially when in many cases both the gathering of the previous evidence and the later study are publicly funded is ludicrous.
Agreed, but that's what you get when you apply capitalism to science.
But then so is so much else that in the cold light of day makes no sense, (copyright of certain seeds, with DRM type traits to enforce re-purchase for example, and its impact on the availability and the legality of heritage seed stocks for one, patenting gene sequences (even if they are novel genetic sequences where sequence's product can be identified) as another) and much of it is for the perceived economic benefit, with no way of testing whether it is a benefit at all.
Exactly right- finally somebody gets it enough for me to ignore the rest of this thread except for it's entertainment value.
Regarding "pay-to-read studies," the system is not as broken as you make it out to be. Practically everyone who wants to have access to a journal can get it. Universities and research-oriented companies subscribe, so all you have to do is walk into a library and peruse them yourself.
This shows the lack of understanding of what I'm talking about. Specialization is good from the point of view of economics- it means nobody needs to know everything. But it is quickly becoming an outdated concept- it's beginning to hold us back.
For example, if I am writing a paper, I am not going to explain undergraduate quantum mechanics, solid state physics, or electromagnetics.
But unless you do, how do you know that maybe biology couldn't make your discovery better, or lead your research into new directions? You don't- because you've specialized too much- and so have everybody else, the guy writing the paper on the transformation chemistry of DNA isn't stooping to link to papers on undergraduate biology either. But that can be rectified with the web- EVERYTHING can be available to EVERYBODY without worrying about cost. We don't need to limit science to specialty anymore.
Well, I'd point out that mathematics isn't a science to begin with. It's a method of modeling that is sometimes used by science and is found to be useful, but is in and of itself it's own philosophy starting with it's own basic axioms. Science is theories that predict the outcome of experiments, and compare those predictions to those experiments- modeling can be useful in this but isn't strictly necessary. So these are related sets, but not necessarily intersecting, to put it in the language of your specialty.
My complaint is far more general than that- where mathematics and other philosophies start with myths and axioms, the basic axiom of the scientific method is that science never should. This isn't always avoidable, agreed, but a true scientist should take every pain possible to include *everything* if they want their work to be useful to the engineer.
If your research is in a special field of study, in fact a sub field, what makes you think people not interested in that sub-field would consider your work news worthy? I mean people interested in your general field of work might not even find it news worthy.
It's amazing what can be found using google these days- cross specialty research can be useful in it's own right.
News is about how something impacts people. It's like the difference between science and engineering. Science is how things work in the world. Engineering is how we use those rules to human ends.
I think you just answered your first question- engineers outside of your science specialty will need to understand your paper to use your advancement to create better designs.
Second, science isn't the only complicated endeavour in the world, yet somehow you read articles about politics, law, economics and finance everyday. They just don't try and explain the wonky bits.
Actually, I'm very interested in the wonky bits- and often find the same problem with those articles as well (that they fail to include their assumptions). Economists are especially bad at admitting their assumptions- I think there's a subconscious fear that if they did, we'd all recognize that what they do isn't science but rather religion.
Good as far as it goes- but in this day and age of electronic searching of possible relevance, do you really think you can count on ONLY the people in your field reading your paper? Cross-specialty research can lead in interesting directions as well- but only if your paper is understood by people *outside* of your specialty.
1) copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare? could you imagine the price of journals if this were required? There are now plenty of journals that allow you to read content for free.
Copyright is an issue only if you believe that science should be governed by economics. I'm sure you can guess from my nick what I think of THAT idea- science should be funded by government and the results of any given study should be considered public domain works. We're 10 years past the need for paper publishing of anything, and electronic publishing costs are negligible at best.
2) not everything can be made explicit. There are many aspects of any scientific field that are "fundamental" and would be tedious to have to re-explain every time.
Oh, poor scientific writer, needing to actually explain "fundamentals" because it's TEDIOUS. I suggest that a free-to-read model could replace such explanations with mere hyperlinks, but only if we first divorce science from the shackles of a capitalist "intellectual property" model.
3) putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read. If people have issues with something, they can pay or do whatever else it takes.
Thus utterly undermining the scientific method with needless economics, hampering the pursuit of knowledge.
4) to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions. sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions were true to begin with. As long as disclaimers are made in your original paper stating further study needs to be done, this may not be an issue
Agreed. The only place this is an issue for is for those who believe that science leads to a definition of reality. For those willing to take the study for what it is, it should be sufficient to link to explanations of the fundamental assumptions and leave it at that.
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The only religion that science ever threatens is one which claims scientific proof. Those religions which claim such things (or claim things which contradict the findings of science) can be scientifically disproven. This is why the mainstream Christian Church (for example) has moved steadily away from any areas covered by science over the centuries. The grounds of the two schools of thought is, at a basic level, now entirely separate. A rational theist can only claim that they choose to believe, and science has no argument about people's choices about intangibles, really.
The Roman Catholic Church took the opposite tack- back in Vatican I we saw the culmination of the Scholastic Theological school of thought, and admitted that which can be scientifically disproven, is false. Instead of moving steadily away- the Vatican started funding observatories and archaeological digs, universities and scientists, in an attempt to follow that original, grand idea of science- to find a way to know God beyond scriptures, beyond revelations, to find the mind of God in God's works. The helmet in TFA gives us the most interesting example of a *repeatable* way to gain personal revelation- one of the most subjective things about religion, faith, just became objective, repeatable, and falsifiable.
I'd disagree with that. The belief in #1 follows from #2, but is in now way proven thereby. Proof requires evidence, whilst #2 provides faith which is necessary to reach the interpretation required to believe #1. Proof and faith are very different things.
#2 isn't just faith- it is empirical research. It's the experience of the experiment. The fact that up until now it wasn't repeatable made it subjective evidence, but even subjective evidence is still evidence. Now that it is OBJECTIVE evidence, #2 becomes proof.
Thanks for the book recommendation, but I shall pass for now. There are many scriptural and philosophical writings.. but the fact that the scientific community doesn't yet recognize prayer as a valid mechanism for affecting the physical world suggests strongly to me that the arguments in the book will not be conclusive.
Well, that would more tell me that the "scientific community" is being willfully ignorant- choosing their data to fit a predetermined conclusion. The fact that you choose to pass based on the predetermined conclusion is strong evidence for such a theory. However, it occurs to me that an alternate theory would be that you've confined the "physical world" to the five human senses, maybe expanded by that technology which can convert other forces and items to that which is discernible by our five human senses. In which case I'd say you're looking at a rather narrow slice of the universe, and choosing to be willfully ignorant of the effect of prayer on the human mind directly.
Beautifully written, I'm sure, but almost certainly much the same as the other philosophical and/or rhetorical arguments which I have heard from members of various religions - none of which offer any testable hypothesis, I'm afraid.
Oh, the Tibetan Book of the Dead offers testable hypothesis. You have to die to test them, but that's not exactly a hard thing to come back from the dead these days, so it's not exactly impossible to complete the experiments. People come back from the dead all the time thanks to modern technology. It was a rare occurrence during the millenia it took to write that book, though.
I'd point out that you'd need fewer of them in this use as you're not going for mechanical strength beyond supporting the cable itself. No need to have it strong enough to support say, a self-powered elevator.
How about the same concept as the space elevator? All you have to do is get those carbon nanotubes to conduct electricity....
Your first is not anything like proof of existence of a deity. It's proof of a natural process and of non-random laws. As far as I know, science has not yet discovered how the universe was created. Can you provide a reference?
Non-Random is enough for me, but a good book on the topic is The Frontiers of Science and Faith.
In fact, to the rational theologist, the ONLY threat science offers to faith is the random nature of quantum physics. *ALL* else, to the rational theologist, is just another scripture, another look at the mind of God from a different perspective. Of course, the rational theologist isn't threatened by competing religions anymore either- except the irrational ones of course. A random, indeterministic universe where at the quantum level the best we can do is probability and a random, unknowable Diety that commands us not to kill one day and to kill every Kufar the next; both of these are equally threatening to the rational theologist.
I don't see the link between your second statement and science.
Then you need to RTFA! The whole point is that the experience of the spiritual is no longer a haphazard experience involving fasting, prayer, meditation and hallucinogenic drugs. It's now a repeatable experiment. From my own theological background- 'tis a pity Mother Theresa failed to live to this day, we could have ended her long dark tea-time of the soul that had persisted for the last 50 years of her life.
Perhaps I misunderstood your claim that science has proven both your points, and that these points in some way support the hypothesis that there is a deity or deities. Could you elaborate?
All of the evidence we've ever had of God, that any theologian has ever had of God, has been 1) His Works and 2) Personal, subjective experience of God. #1 is easily provable to the man who has had #2. But without #2, it's impossible to prove #1. This is the challenge atheism has always presented- how to give people #2. And the answer WAS, you can't. Until now. Now we have a repeatable way to give people #2. Irrational Faith is no longer required- Rational Faith can be proven.
While you're at it, can you please provide a reference for this as well? In all credible double-blind tests I've ever read about, prayer was shown to have no effect whatsoever.
Depends on what you're looking at prayer to DO. In this case, there's a scientific document that you need to read: This work of Eastern science took several thousand years to write, and is far more credible than anything else I've ever seen on the topic of exploring connections to the divine (especially the connection at the point of death). Several thousand case studies went into it.
Unlike the irrational faiths- the rational theologist doesn't throw out subjective evidence merely because it is SUBJECTIVE.
Well, there's more to a cucumber than just the drawing. But once drawn, one cannot say that cucumbers don't exist.
A photo's better, but heck, most of the animals and plants recorded by the *scientific* Lewis and Clarke expedition were drawn.
The point is that for existence alone, all that is required is a repeatable, documented experiment. Which is what we have in TFA.
That's the extreme weak form of faith- irrational faith, to paraphrase Pope Benedict. Of course, a lot of priests and nuns in Islamic countries paid the ultimate price for the Pope to say that (it was the same speech that he quoted a 10th century Byzantine Emperor's opinion about Islam as an example of irrational faith). Rational faith *MUST* accept scientific fact.....
It doesn't answer the question at all, and I'm surprised by your logical fallacy.
Maybe because I'm not a fundamentalist- and I don't hold to a fundamentalist definition of "God".
God is two things to me, and both have been proven by science. The first is that there was a process that created our natural laws and our universe; those laws are not random. The second is the "personal God"- the feeling of the presence of the divine that causes human beings to do community-inspired acts of goodness. This is absolute proof of the second.
Just because stimulating the brain a certain way gives an experience comparable to the "presence of God" doesn't mean that that's the only way you can feel the presence of God. You can extract certain compounds and use them to convince someone he is smelling violets, or roses or food, but that doesn't mean every time he smells those things it's only because someone is spraying those compounds in the air. It could be because those things (violets, roses, food) are really present.
Uh, yes, so what? Just because we can explain a miracle does not make it any less of a miracle. The fact that we now have a more repeatable way to stimulate the same areas of the brain that fasting and prayer do, does not negate that fasting and prayer *also* work.
Furthermore, as a religious person who believes in God, I've never experienced the sensation of a presence in that way. I believe God is there, but it doesn't seem He's chosen that way to reveal Himself to me.
Well, the variety of stimuli is immense- and not all work for all people. Perhaps you've just failed to find the situation that works for you. But now, thanks to science, you don't have to find a situation that works for you- this helmet works for *EVERYBODY*.
I'm sure that someone will prove why the helmet proves the existence of God, as this helmet is really just a divine cellphone.
Or rather, at least a mimicing of other, lesser forms of divine cellphone: fasting, hallucinogenic drugs, etc.
I'm also sure that someone will say the helmet strengthens their faith, as it makes them just have to redouble their efforts to maintain their delusion.
What delusion? What delusion would be left? If in fact what we've got is a *repeatable* divine cellphone, then anybody can "experience God", or what the religious have always called God- thus God becomes a *fact*, not a delusion.
God is the ultimate Anonymous Coward -- he has infinite ability, but uses it to hide from our scientific tests with mathematical certitude.
Except now, given this invention, we now have the ability to summon Him with mathematical certitude. Kind of destroys the whole need for faith, doesn't it?
Doesn't a cruise missile imply some form of direction control? Despite the separating S-foils, I see no direction control on this thing. It's a BALLISTIC missile.
Tritium is available in the environment already; it's a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen, and it's half life is pretty low (~12 years).
Seems to me that's an argument *against* this being a 30 year battery- wouldn't it be putting out only half the power after 12 years?
Hey, if you like supporting a lack of human rights and like being a traitor to your neighbors, go ahead- but remember that your own job is supported by the consumers that you're putting out of work.
Best for minimizing cost going to China is http://www.unionbuiltpc.com/home.php, their laptop sources American made parts first, free world parts second, Chinese parts last.
But the real question for Mr. Kevin Smith is, will the cameras catch Jay and Silent Bob in their next drug deal?
Ok, so how will the Linux geeks help them with their cute little pink iMacs and iPods?
"This is an assumption" and a link explaining it as such is plenty. For anybody.
I'm sorry- what does football have to do with either communism or science? Or did I get the wrong Lemark?
What do you mean by "everything". Do you mean I should add an apendix where I copy the entry for "explicit" from Webster's?
Nah, just link to it.
What the heck is the "peer review system" you talk about? What in hell are "pay-to-read studies"? What's an study, after all? Is it the same one of those on Nature than the review the "Apocalypsers of the Seven Day of the Return of the Beast" give me for free in the middle of the street?
True enough- I should have linked to my definitions.
Just to express this cleanly: here you just tried to "plain talk" about a certain non-technical common-sense issue. But even then, your two paragrahps are full of non-trivial asumptions and non-referenced assertions (do you *really* think any layman will understand i.e. what the peer-review system is and why it's any better than an authority-based assertion?) and still you expect that on really very especialized fields any technical article can go on all-explicit? I published some scientific papers back on my day... do you really mean I should add to my ten pages article the more than 1000 pages from the Strassburger's book on Botanics that backed them up (among others)? Or else, how do you expect for a layman to understand what do I mean when I talk about i.e. "cormophyte vs spermaphyte biological selection understanding by means of echotopic adherence function"?
A hyperlink will do.
My whole argument with mathematics as it is taught in the United States is that it is taught backwards. I didn't really understand the axioms of basic computation until I took Numerical Methods- a senior year undergraduate class that should have been taught to six year olds. If we did, the rest would all fall into place.
Having said that, I disagree on the purpose of journal articles- to me the purpose of journal articles is to transmit knowledge from scientists to engineers. And then, yes, I expect any relevant assumption or axiom to at least be linked to. It doesn't need a full explanation, just a "click here if you don't understand"- and that pointer can lead to a textbook that contains the material.
The idea that someone can not reproduce evidence to support a study, especially when in many cases both the gathering of the previous evidence and the later study are publicly funded is ludicrous.
Agreed, but that's what you get when you apply capitalism to science.
But then so is so much else that in the cold light of day makes no sense, (copyright of certain seeds, with DRM type traits to enforce re-purchase for example, and its impact on the availability and the legality of heritage seed stocks for one, patenting gene sequences (even if they are novel genetic sequences where sequence's product can be identified) as another) and much of it is for the perceived economic benefit, with no way of testing whether it is a benefit at all.
Exactly right- finally somebody gets it enough for me to ignore the rest of this thread except for it's entertainment value.
Regarding "pay-to-read studies," the system is not as broken as you make it out to be. Practically everyone who wants to have access to a journal can get it. Universities and research-oriented companies subscribe, so all you have to do is walk into a library and peruse them yourself.
This shows the lack of understanding of what I'm talking about. Specialization is good from the point of view of economics- it means nobody needs to know everything. But it is quickly becoming an outdated concept- it's beginning to hold us back.
For example, if I am writing a paper, I am not going to explain undergraduate quantum mechanics, solid state physics, or electromagnetics.
But unless you do, how do you know that maybe biology couldn't make your discovery better, or lead your research into new directions? You don't- because you've specialized too much- and so have everybody else, the guy writing the paper on the transformation chemistry of DNA isn't stooping to link to papers on undergraduate biology either. But that can be rectified with the web- EVERYTHING can be available to EVERYBODY without worrying about cost. We don't need to limit science to specialty anymore.
Well, I'd point out that mathematics isn't a science to begin with. It's a method of modeling that is sometimes used by science and is found to be useful, but is in and of itself it's own philosophy starting with it's own basic axioms. Science is theories that predict the outcome of experiments, and compare those predictions to those experiments- modeling can be useful in this but isn't strictly necessary. So these are related sets, but not necessarily intersecting, to put it in the language of your specialty.
My complaint is far more general than that- where mathematics and other philosophies start with myths and axioms, the basic axiom of the scientific method is that science never should. This isn't always avoidable, agreed, but a true scientist should take every pain possible to include *everything* if they want their work to be useful to the engineer.
If your research is in a special field of study, in fact a sub field, what makes you think people not interested in that sub-field would consider your work news worthy? I mean people interested in your general field of work might not even find it news worthy.
It's amazing what can be found using google these days- cross specialty research can be useful in it's own right.
News is about how something impacts people. It's like the difference between science and engineering. Science is how things work in the world. Engineering is how we use those rules to human ends.
I think you just answered your first question- engineers outside of your science specialty will need to understand your paper to use your advancement to create better designs.
Second, science isn't the only complicated endeavour in the world, yet somehow you read articles about politics, law, economics and finance everyday. They just don't try and explain the wonky bits.
Actually, I'm very interested in the wonky bits- and often find the same problem with those articles as well (that they fail to include their assumptions). Economists are especially bad at admitting their assumptions- I think there's a subconscious fear that if they did, we'd all recognize that what they do isn't science but rather religion.
Good as far as it goes- but in this day and age of electronic searching of possible relevance, do you really think you can count on ONLY the people in your field reading your paper? Cross-specialty research can lead in interesting directions as well- but only if your paper is understood by people *outside* of your specialty.
1) copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare? could you imagine the price of journals if this were required? There are now plenty of journals that allow you to read content for free.
Copyright is an issue only if you believe that science should be governed by economics. I'm sure you can guess from my nick what I think of THAT idea- science should be funded by government and the results of any given study should be considered public domain works. We're 10 years past the need for paper publishing of anything, and electronic publishing costs are negligible at best.
2) not everything can be made explicit. There are many aspects of any scientific field that are "fundamental" and would be tedious to have to re-explain every time.
Oh, poor scientific writer, needing to actually explain "fundamentals" because it's TEDIOUS. I suggest that a free-to-read model could replace such explanations with mere hyperlinks, but only if we first divorce science from the shackles of a capitalist "intellectual property" model.
3) putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read. If people have issues with something, they can pay or do whatever else it takes.
Thus utterly undermining the scientific method with needless economics, hampering the pursuit of knowledge.
4) to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions. sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions were true to begin with. As long as disclaimers are made in your original paper stating further study needs to be done, this may not be an issue
Agreed. The only place this is an issue for is for those who believe that science leads to a definition of reality. For those willing to take the study for what it is, it should be sufficient to link to explanations of the fundamental assumptions and leave it at that.