Science Is Bullshit

You wont find many people doing pure science for the money. A friend of mine who graduated last year gets more than twice my grant for their first years work. I guess a few scientists who have been successful do it for the money. Given how much money there is in banking and consultancy physicists and mathematicians in particular do not go into professional science for the money.

'Find a job you love and you will not work a day in your life.' <- Confuscious

 

true dat.

I have a love affair with applied chem, just something I enjoy doing. It's not really about the money, or else I'd go into drug development.

 

There are many scientist out there who are closed minded idiots, there are so called scientists who only want to better themselves and their friends and make $$$. Dont be confused by b ad science. Pure science is all there is and few know and/or care about it.

 

Actually if they weren't getting paid to do it, they'd still be doing it, for the right reasons too.

 

^best sig picture ever.

that is all.

 

Make me laugh still

 

Citrus,


I just skipped from page 1 to page 11, but looking at your initial post on page 1 and the responses on pages 1 and 11 it seems to me that you've 'stirred the pot.' I have found that many technicians, scientists and engineers do not truly understand scientific method as well as it can be understood, this is to say that I have found that scientific method is most often applied effectively within one set of "areas" but not applied effectively in another set; scientific method is a means for acquiring and establishing knowledge that is capable of being shared and tested; and, this certainly does not mean that it establishes or covers all available knowledge or types of knowledge. There are many instances where scientists are incorrect and thier view becomes modified, being 'open' to new hypotheses and being honest are key requirements for effective use of scientific method; there are many instances where hypotheses have been proposed or observations have been made that are laughed at (or much worse - even today) by the establishment but that later hold to be true. One of the major problems with egoistic, political or business-related approaches to science is the impeding of unique or new work; I have personal experience with this. Some of the great inventors, in the 'modern age,' have been destroyed by corrupt business-related, or political-related, activities. One of the names of the game in science is to 'rock the boat'; to open new vistas; and often this will often encounter resistance. "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds," A.E. and "Imagination is more important than knowledge," A.E.. I can describe dozens of instances that I know of where scientisits and others who are required to understand the principles of scientific method as it relates their work, for example medical doctors, who have made errors and subsequently have ego-related issues, as an example, that slow or even stop their acknowledgement of the truths that lay before them. Being a scientist or applying scientific method, in my view, actually tests and forges the spirit of 'man'; how one responds to these "forces" is, in my opinion a spiritual/psychological matter.


Peace,

David




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Yes..great spirits HAVE always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds..

Natural23 has my vote. And my support.
Mediocre minds comes not from arrogance. But observation.
Those minds are not mediocre by nature.. but choice.
Most humans do not reveal great human or physical truths.
Occam knows thousands that do not WISH to think on this level.
It is a CHOICE
They are happy to have families and work to support that.
To relax and enjoy the time they have. Watch TV and and play with kids..
occam envies.

Those that are DRIVEN..The unhappy ones mostly..want to reveal the nature of reality.
They were born into this reality and they make it their purpose to understand it.

If a being wants to understand. Not even a GOD can find a reason to argue with such a path.

'One should have faith' is the greatest lie of all.

Occam

 

I still dont understand why people would go into science for the money given that its about the worst paid job that you can go into direct from uni. The only financial benefit is that it'll be years before I earn enough to start paying back any loans. A few scientists make a discovery that leads to a spin off company and they can make their millions but it pretty much impossible to guarantee that will happen.

I know scientists can seem dismissive, if a theory is correct then it should stand up to any scrutiny. There is a fine line between being open to new ideas and making sure that you dont start believing everything. Personally I say a hypothesis can be as crazy as you like, many of the best ones were. The difference between a great scientist and a nut job is that a great scientist will perform experiements and find out if its true before telling the world. In science it never does to be the boy who cries wolf.

 

Yes, honesty is key in any field where one requires objectivity; although this is not always obvious. I have found that humans appear to think for the most part in "non-verbal languages" and this, I believe, often causes difficulty in that someone may see something that they cannot communicate or have great difficulty communicating externally to another; and, I have often found that those who have stringent requirements on how an attempt to initially communicate an awareness or concept is made can shut themselves out from considering something that may be significant; this is often the case, for example, when a patient has an awareness of their condition that he/she is trying communicate to a medical doctor charged with their care. But this touches on many areas including professionals communicating. The goal in science includes objective expression but some of the best works begin as 'intuition' or "non-verbal awarenesses" that are evolved so as to be able to be communicated and further evolved.



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depends on the field of research; I know nanotechnology research is booming business, I even entertained the idea of getting into a Nanochem program, but I think I'll go with something more biochem related (just out of pure interest).

agreed. some scientists will literally drive themselves mad, going back to the drawing board and working out the kinks of a theory. they are, in a sense, engineers with a research frame of mind.
but yeah, if you can't systematically replicate results, a hypothesis is merely chit-chat material over coffee.

 

Fat tony

Describe the experiments einstein performed before forwarding his theories
of special relativity to the world in 1905.

Occam

 

Einstein performed a mind experiment (a close run thing but luckly he was good enough to pull it off) where he pictured two people in two inertial reference frames. He used two postulates as a starting point, firstly that the laws of physics should be the same whatever your inertial reference frame and secondly that the speed of light is invarant in any interial reference frame. The first postulate was a general experience based hypothesis (i.e. in a train you use the same laws of physics you use when your stationary). The second was an attempt to explain experimental data aquired by Michelson and Morley in the late 19th century. Whether Einstein knew of this work or simply implied it from Maxwells equations is unknown.

In his mind experiment, two observers, one on a train and another trackside compared how long they each thought various events took. By clever use of simple geometry the laws of special relativity come out quite simply. Its true that there was no physical experiment behind relativity but people at the time were cautious until proving experiments as been performed, though it did explain some of the experimental annomalies of the 19th century quite well so there was a lot of confidence it would work.

You have to be careful with mind experiments, after all it gave us the Copenhagen interpretation of QM which may yet turn out to be an error after nearly 70 years.

 

So mind experiments.. or 'gedanken experiment'

Are valid in scientific method?
Scientific method says they are not.
Occam suggests thay CAN be JUST as accurate.. if not more so to what IS.
Mind is not limmited by current technology.
It all.
Depends on the mind.

Occam

 

everything is bullshit.

it's the cosmic joke.

 

Told by whom?

 

Mind experiments are a branch of theoretical physics and like all theoretical physics its a very powerful tool if your starting points (Ansatz - more German) are correct. In the past this was not a problem when Maxwell formulated the classical understanding of Electromagnetism he was explaining work done by Ampere, Gauss and others. Einstein in 1905 explained Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and relativity all of which where explaining problems posed by experimental physics. Although quite how much Einstein knew of the experimental work when he did SR is not known, I think he claimed to unaware of some of it.

Now though theory is a long way ahead of experiments ability to test it, computers a powerful and equations can be solved numerically where analytical solutions are all but impossible. This is fine but people have to acknowledge that a theory does NOT represent anything in the physical world, there are a lot of mutually exclusive theories out there all with sound theoretical bases. I have read a couple of textbooks on black holes at different levels one described them as a hole nothing can escape from and the other talked about their shape in spacetime, but they had one thing in common, from the way they were written you could be forgiven for thinking you could hop on the train and go and visit one. Well you cant, infact we dont even know they exist, there is nothing we see that cannot be explained by another method, infact QM would look much better if the didnt exist. Theory is great but forgetting that its a theory turns scientific method into a form of faith.

 

Tony
Much truth
Occam agrees on the black hole angle..
There ARE many theories of what exists inside an event horizon
Anything from dimensionless points to absolute mass bodies.

The only way to get in there is to speculate cause we have nothing concrete to
feed into computers.
Occams thinks it better to speculate than to not.
Imagineering HAS resulted in ALL the most profound realworld advances..A simple one is A C clarke and satelites.
And theres a whole list starting with the wright brothers that needs consideration as well.

And that is where occam is comming from.
Advances in scientific understanding BEGIN with the imagineerers.
Not. the technicians and their new and powerfull tools.. the computer.
They..exist TO TEST THE DREAMS.. They are a filter we call scientific method.

Occam

 

Its true that its not certain what happens inside a black hole, but there are alternative theories to black holes themselves. Which are built on sound physics also.

 

Tony

Occam would like to hear them.

His understanding has singularities as products of X [sol]mass suns ex/imploding to compact mass into a gravity gradient that results in a local area isolation from our reality.
That most galaxies have sm singularities at core.. they are very common.

Accretion disk dynamics, occam is very interestested in. They are the last interaction of our reality with the event horizon. Much can be learned.
Funny, we hav'nt even seen one [an accretion disk] but occam thinks they are as real as big macs. [but not as a 'hamburger']

Love this stuff... this is what thinking is made of. As a autodidact generalist philosopher/scientist.
Occam went straight to this conceptual
interface of reality on learning of it.. and has not left.

He has taught 3 children[one my own 2 my sisters]
enough gravity mechanics and laws or angular momentum to put them at uni level cause they were AMAZED at the idea
of spagetification.[he tricked them here with a term they thought real cool].. LOL..whatever it takes. [The youngest understood at 10 what occam was saying, bless my genes hahaha. He even told school bully 'watch out or i'll spagetify u'.. now thats a new one.]

Occam