The Sick State of Todays Science

[darkbeaver]

My post was pointing out why you can't produce a single course that seeks to boil many disciplines in science down to one concentrated offering. It's not possible, because there is no unified theory of everything. It would be nice if we could distill it down to one course, my debt load would be far less burdensome for starters. I don't believe it's a pragmatic solution to shoot for. More like a wish.

If you look at interdisciplinary studies that appear in refereed journals, you will notice that quite a few of those et al. papers are that way because they incorporate specialists from different disciplines (and even intradisciplinary) to work on a common problem. There is nothing wrong with that approach. In fact having more eyes and more ears looking and listening is much better than one know-it-all proceeding at the behest of other opinions and hypotheses.

Conspiracy in my view is a cop out. It's very easy to focus blame onto some archetype for the ills in society. Whether that be social injustice, economic malfeasance, incalculable acts of violence, or the favour of one theory over another.

If these conspircaies could actually forward some concrete solutions, to real problems, I'd be willing to entertain them. Until that time it is paranoid nitpicking.

Your stated admiration for concrete is laudable however is it what you practice? Black holes dark matter and energy have not a shread of concrete about them and yet I have seen you express your belief in them. You discount conspiracy at your peril sir, I can point you to ten thousand such manifestations of events of same with exactly the social and economic ramifications which you lightly discard as the architypical cop out. It should be very easy to demonstrate to you, a man of science, the role of conspiracy in your life, or would it be?
I have not the slightest hesitation in recommending to you and others that conspiracy exists in the highest academic circles for the standard lowest reasons. What could possibly have convinced you of some sacred firewall that insulates the peers of science from the concrete realities of money and power? What makes you think that science, apart from all else, has been allowed to exist in some acedemic sanctuary where it is permitted by virtue of it's adherance of the one true doctrine to circumvent the same physicaly corrupting atmosphere that every other human institution is subjected to? I hope and pray that someday you do not want funding for some breakthrough that provides free power or a cure for cancer or some other invention which threatens the status-quo. Conspiracy is real Tonnington. It dosen't require a degree to understan that,.:smile:

 

[Tonington]

Well, my brother happens to be an active researcher involving black holes. Physics is not my strong suit, it's the biological sciences that I do well in. But when he explains things to me, I tend to believe the things he says. You can pull webpage links from all over the internet that says there is no evidence of them, but that's flatly false. I don't say that conspiracies don't exist, I say the propensity to use them to explain all slights is lazy.

A degree isn't needed to understand many things, however. It helps to understand how science works, when you actually see with your eyes, experience the bureaucracy of proposals, literature reviews, primary research, etc. There's plenty of bones to pick. Some scientists are moving towards more openness. Try the Public Library of Science. It's lifesciences, but it's a place where authors publish their findings online so that all may benefit from their discoveries. Other scientists are tentative to have such findings so freely available. Maybe they think the politicization of science by media will ensure that more findings are distorted by cherry picking grudge artists.

What's funny is this weird fixation on financial matters. How do you propose to keep science advancing as it has, without grants from largely tax payer sources? Do you want industry to take a larger role? How do you propose to make science more meritorious? This is my point, you pick nits, but don't forward any kind of pragmatic solution to your asserted problem with modern science. This is your chance.

 

[darkbeaver]

Well, my brother happens to be an active researcher involving black holes. Physics is not my strong suit, it's the biological sciences that I do well in. But when he explains things to me, I tend to believe the things he says. You can pull webpage links from all over the internet that says there is no evidence of them, but that's flatly false. I don't say that conspiracies don't exist, I say the propensity to use them to explain all slights is lazy.

A degree isn't needed to understand many things, however. It helps to understand how science works, when you actually see with your eyes, experience the bureaucracy of proposals, literature reviews, primary research, etc. There's plenty of bones to pick. Some scientists are moving towards more openness. Try the Public Library of Science. It's lifesciences, but it's a place where authors publish their findings online so that all may benefit from their discoveries. Other scientists are tentative to have such findings so freely available. Maybe they think the politicization of science by media will ensure that more findings are distorted by cherry picking grudge artists.

What's funny is this weird fixation on financial matters. How do you propose to keep science advancing as it has, without grants from largely tax payer sources? Do you want industry to take a larger role? How do you propose to make science more meritorious? This is my point, you pick nits, but don't forward any kind of pragmatic solution to your asserted problem with modern science. This is your chance.

The fixation on financial matters appears weird to you? I don't propose to keep science advanceing as it is, I envision vast improvements. You can take my nit-picking about banking as the first of my proposed pragmatic improvments for all human endeavours. You seem to be oblivious to the great market steering power that controls what will be introduced to and for public consumption, how do you imagine we are still stuck with the piston driven internal combustion engine or expensive ineffective pharmasueticals or why our food and housing is unhealthy and substandard, all of those human activities are controled not by scientific fact or reason but by capital alone. The list of scientific developements suppressed and shelved by money whos only interest is preserving capital inflow is impressive and it should be alarming to you. If you think some breakthrough in biology for instance will be universaly greated with joy and anticipation of it's widespread adoption because of it's disinterested merit you are sorely mistaken Tonnington. Money and office rules science, reason is a poor defence against power, you can if you like familiarize yourself with the visious vitriolic history of academic condemnation of virtually every new discovery by the entrenched interests even in the face of proof to the contrary. You only imagine that it is different today. Real science does not work any differently than real plumbing or real carpentry, you seem to think it's on a pedestal by itself, some sort of singular thing apart from the rest of humanity . It isn't but that is exactly what is thought and taught today.
No evidence whatever of blackholes dark matter or dark energy exists, everyone of those bizzarre concepts is purely fictionalized to preserve a grand hypothesis that would have boiled away decades ago like the foul gas that it is.
"Cherry picking grudge artist" ? A real egghead couldn't articulate his/her emotions
fluently like that.:lol:

 

[darkbeaver]

It is with pleasure I have studied the progress made by BlackLight Power Inc. The technology and setup they use resembles very much the setup which is described in the abstract fom the book by Nicholas Moller "Irving Langmuir and the Atomic Hydrogen". Irving Langmuir was a senior scientist at General Electric in the 1920' and 30'. He was the inventer of the tungsten Light Bulb and he received the Nobel Prize in 1932. Langmuir used tunsten as the catalyst rather than a Renay Nickel variant used by BlackLight power. Langmuir was a close friend of Niels Bohr an other Nobel Prize winner,who evaluated the process which like BLP use water as fuel once the process has been started. I do not want to discuss the theory behind the two processes but only the setup in the experiments and the results observed.
I believe the validation performed by Professor Peter Jansson at Rowan University is very sound especially when compared with the experiments performed by Langmuir given the different catalyst used.

I would very much appriciate any comments once they have studied the process described in the abstracts from the above book written by Nicholas Moller.

Lebirchan

I'll give it a shot later this evening Lebirchan when I've had a chance to read the abstracts. There is little hope of the others discussing anything unless it's approved by convention.

The link to the PDF at Mollers page didn't work.Free Energy from Atomic Hydrogen by Nicholas Moller

 

[L Gilbert]

I think DB's already set the tone, with that scornful thread title and remarks like "they're just stupid isolated eggheads."

I agree. Seemed to me that the OP is one that invites scorn from those that value science for those that believe in mysticism and ignorance.

 

[L Gilbert]

I don't understand patent law at all, but I do understand the second law of thermodynamics.

Besides that concept, I understand fire and diesel mechanics and have no WISH to know all about patent law either. Or history, or psychiatry, or civil engineering, or .......

 

[Tonington]

The fixation on financial matters appears weird to you?

When it comes to how science works, yes. If you reduce funding, you reduce gainful knowledge. You reduce gainful knowledge, and you reduce the ability to find efficacious solutions to myriad problems. So, if you think the world is fine as it is, and we shouldn't strive for more efficient machines, better health care delivery, , then yes, I guess we should cut back on public science grants.

how do you imagine we are still stuck with the piston driven internal combustion engine

Because environmental costs are still externalized. If there were enticements to conserve energy, and conserve eco-systems, well then we might have a greater market impact of electric propulsion vehicles. That's not a science problem. Science works to address both of those facts. The issue is political and short-sighted economics.

expensive ineffective pharmasueticals or why our food and housing is unhealthy and substandard

There are plenty of effective pharmaceuticals. In Canada they're a little cheaper then elsewhere because provincial health plans purchase large amounts of the drugs. Some are quite expensive, but you're non-sensical. You say pharmaceuticals are ineffective. It costs an awful lot of money to run tests on drug efficacy. But you complain about price, when if we sacrifice proper experimental design for cost we get statistically impotent results.

If you think some breakthrough in biology for instance will be universaly greated with joy and anticipation of it's widespread adoption because of it's disinterested merit you are sorely mistaken Tonnington.

I never said it would be greeted with universal joy and anticipation. There's plenty of people who will disagree. Breakthroughs in any event are rare, and they take time to really percolate through society. A cursory look at history will illustrate that. The Gallileos are rare. But many failed scientists attempt to wear that crown.

Real science does not work any differently than real plumbing or real carpentry, you seem to think it's on a pedestal by itself, some sort of singular thing apart from the rest of humanity .

On the contrary. I understand very well that the world doesn't work by simple linear regression. Hence my guffaw at your assertions about eggheads and science.

No evidence whatever of blackholes dark matter or dark energy exists, everyone of those bizzarre concepts is purely fictionalized to preserve a grand hypothesis that would have boiled away decades ago like the foul gas that it is.

Yet black holes mass can be measured in different methods, with robust results. If they were purely fictional, a result of spurious statistics or calculations, then different physical methods for observing phenomena across the galaxy should not yield the same results.

Look it up if you want, black hole at the center of NGC 4649. Measured the mass using gravitational field, and confirmed by measuring temperature. Two independent methods that verified a weight of 3.4 Billion of our Sun.

"Cherry picking grudge artist" ? A real egghead couldn't articulate his/her emotions
fluently like that.:lol:

Well, I'm still just a student.

 

[darkbeaver]

I agree. Seemed to me that the OP is one that invites scorn from those that value science for those that believe in mysticism and ignorance.

You're confusing me, black holes are mystic ignorance based on the creation theology known as The Big Bang. Even the worst enemys of science value it or they wouldn't spend so much time and effort suppressing it.

 

[L Gilbert]

Sorry. I can understand your confusion. I will clarify for you; I never said anything about black holes or big bangs. If you think you can explain things more satisfactorily using ignorance and mysticism than science can using evidence, I am sorry for you.
As I said in another thread, at least science changes as it comes by new evidence.

 

[Scott Free]

No thier not criminals they're just stupid isolated eggheads who've specialized to such an extent that they can't communicate between thier various schools of official theology.

I believe it was Arnold Toynbee that showed civilizations in decline tend to indulge in specialization. That is to say that a sign of a civilizations decline is the amount of specialization it has.

It is a symptom too that regular people are pushed out of the sciences by a lack of "authority" and methods such as tyranny of mathematics. Given the amount that is unknown there is no justification for such exclusion; anyone could make a discovery.

Is that not the exact method an oligarchy uses to maintain its power? They exclude and dazzle with BS.

There is a new hidden class system of educated elites that are maintaining their status through methodologies that exclude. It will be the downfall of our civilization just as it has been for so many others.

 

[L Gilbert]

hehe
I think politics & religions are the real reasons behind the downfalls of civilisations. Technocracy, I think, is what you are referring to. Science is only the tool we use to understand our universe, world, etc.

 

[Tyr]

No thier not criminals they're just stupid isolated eggheads who've specialized to such an extent that they can't communicate between thier various schools of official theology.

Simple question.

Are you a practicing Scientist?

If you are, why would you refute any argument. That's the basis of science.

If you are not... Quit blowin' smoke up everyone's butt

 

[CanadianLove]

My post was pointing out why you can't produce a single course that seeks to boil many disciplines in science down to one concentrated offering. It's not possible, because there is no unified theory of everything. It would be nice if we could distill it down to one course, my debt load would be far less burdensome for starters. I don't believe it's a pragmatic solution to shoot for. More like a wish.

What if they taught a course in science of all things proven. No theories, because theories are just opinions of another scientist, not proof. That would cut the load down a bit. It would likely end as a major on how to use the various instruments from each science.

 

[Tonington]

Theories are not the opinions of another scientist. You're confusing the common use of the word theory with the scientific meaning. In common use:

There's a dead man on the floor, and each of the two detectives has a theory about how the man died. That is a best guess, or deduction.

A scientific theory is an explanation of a physical phenomenon. The apple always falls to the floor when you push it off the counter. The theory of gravity explains how that happens. It's based on many observations. A theory is the result of many scientists' work, combined into a cogent explanation. It is repeatable, and can make successful predictions.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

What if they taught a course in science of all things proven. No theories, because theories are just opinions of another scientist, not proof.

No CL, that's not what a scientific theory is. In simple terms, it's a coherent and consistent body of ideas, observations, information, and analyses that describe and explain a defined range of phenomena. Theories are a crucial part of the body of science, they're the unifying ideas, it's not possible to teach science without them unless it's just reduced to a stultifying recitation of facts with no conceptual framework to fit them into. The theories are what make sense of the data and enable science to predict things not yet seen, and it's been very successful at that.

If you read the article at the link given in the OP you'd have come across this statement: "The only revolution required is a half turn and that we back out of these blind alleys and return to classical physics." The blind alleys referred to are quantum theory and general relativity, and that statement by itself encapsulates what's wrong with the article, and the general mindset of the people who run and contribute to that site. They think they can explain 20th and 21st century results with 19th century tools and concepts, and they cannot. Quantum theory and general relativity were invented because classical physics could not explain certain pretty basic observed facts about how nature behaves, chief among them being the precession of Mercury's orbit, the spectrum of what's called black body radiation, and the results of what's called the double slit experiment. Wikipedia has pretty good descriptions of all of them, and if you decide to go look, also search for "ultraviolet catastrophe." It's at the heart of the black body radiation problem in classical physics.

Any physicist worthy of that label would immediately concede that we know there's something wrong with quantum theory and general relativity, because they're fundamentally inconsistent conceptually, but within the limits of their range of application, no exception to their predictions has ever been found; they work very well as descriptions of how nature behaves. The computer you're sitting at depends on quantum effects for its operation, and in manufacturing its components we apply the mathematical rules of quantum theory that convert quantum processes into macroscopic phenomena. GPS satellites require relativistic corrections to their signals because of their altitude, where the gravitational effects are smaller than they are at the earth's surface, which affects clock synchronization, and because of their velocity, which also affects clock synchronization. The inconsistency between quantum and relativity theories shows up only in extreme circumstances, like conditions of very high energy, very high temperature, huge masses, and so on. There they produce nonsense results, akin to dividing by zero, so we know there's at least one more layer of reality we don't understand, we should be able to unify those theories so they're consistent. We haven't so far, and personally I'm inclined to think there are many more layers of reality we haven't penetrated, not just one, I expect nature will show the same degree of complexity no matter what scale we examine it at.

The main idea in the article posted in the OP is that there's something wrong with contemporary physics, and to that extent it's correct, there really *is* something missing from our current understanding and every physicist knows it. But to suggest, as Darkbeaver and that site do, that it's due to a conspiracy of vested interests, is paranoid nonsense. He claims to be a cutting edge scientist, but he's not. Here's how a real cutting edge scientist thinks:

"Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do."

That's Richard Dawkins.

 

[CanadianLove]

I still think if you had a scientist who did not have the outside influences of other peoples concepts and theories to hamper them, the answers would come a lot faster. The problem then would be the 10 years of scrutiny that the others would inflict before they could admit their own past work was for not.

A truely enlightened person has the mind of a child. Innocent and free to see things as they are.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

I still think if you had a scientist who did not have the outside influences of other peoples concepts and theories to hamper them,..

No such animal, and there cannot be. Science is cumulative, every working scientist builds on the concepts and theories of those who came before. There's no other way to do it. Sometimes new ideas come along that turn a lot of previous work on its head, some scientists suddenly understand they've been wrong for their entire working lives and, being human, it's very painful to them. The powerfully convincing evidence of continental drift did that to a few people, as did the advent of chaos theory. Some people were badly hurt and professionally offended, but science endured.

A truely enlightened person has the mind of a child. Innocent and free to see things as they are.

When was the last time you talked seriously with a child? They don't see thing as they are, they don't have the analytical or critical thinking skills to do that. I've fathered a few, and a large part of the burden of parenting is correcting children's misconceptions, starting with the basic fact that the world isn't all about them or arranged for their convenience.

 

[talloola]

It takes children most of their childhood, and some beyond that, to figure out that
everything isn't all about 'them', so how they would ever look into the world and
have a pure vision of how things really are, is beyond me, maybe a few exceptional
children, but the majority, no way.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

It takes children most of their childhood, and some beyond that, to figure out that everything isn't all about 'them'...

Yep, and some people, alas, *never* figure it out.

 

[talloola]

Yep, and some people, alas, *never* figure it out.

yes, I know a few.