Question:
Do you think you are more certain of your faith in the veracity of the Scientific Method than the most devout of religious followers are in the veracity of their Religion?
New book calls science a "Priesthood"
- Thread starter rpenner
- Start date
Do you think you are more certain of your faith in the veracity of the Scientific Method than the most devout of religious followers are in the veracity of their Religion?
I have the writings of Wallace, so I know Wallace had loonie ideas; what more information does one need?
Are you suggesting that anyone who disagrees with you, about some questions of physics, is a lunatic??
I emphatically state that anyone who disagrees with well-established empirical facts has an issue, not just with me, but with reality and the vast majority of professional scientists.
For Wallace, an author that you assert had some professional training to have strayed so far from the totality of observation, is sad indeed and indistinguishable from either abject intellectual dishonesty or lunacy.
For Wallace, an author that you assert had some professional training to have strayed so far from the totality of observation, is sad indeed and indistinguishable from either abject intellectual dishonesty or lunacy.
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That sounds fair. Which "well-established empirical facts", if any, do you claim Wallace disagreed with?
What does that mean? Specifically, what is the well-established empirical fact and what was Wallace's statement of disagreement?
I have no faith whatsoever in the veracity of the Scientific Method. I don't see how what is essentially a rule of thumb or principle of care in research even has such a property. I doubt that veracity is even a relevant concept.rjbeery said:
We have yet to see examples of this:
I can't think of any, myself.
Agnostic concerning...? Yes, I noticed you like to discuss math and science. I was surprised you expressed an anti-science sentiment.
Even that doesn't have any bearing on the ideation that Science is a flawed institution, nor does it lend credence to the proposition that scientists behave like a priesthood. And I don't understand how Science has anything to do with elitism whatsoever. If some people build personal power on account of their ...what?...their job?..., that just reflects an individual's personality, not a doctrine acquired from any of the literature, which deals exclusively with understanding nature.
I suppose if my reality does not incorporate the bad guys in your reality, then you might conclude that I'm blind. Besides not seeing them, I have yet to understand who they are or what they have done. I see no evidence, and I hear no credible, verifiable or specific complaints. Clearly it's not my eyes. What is the nature of this blindness you diagnose me with? And which science has gone astray - the logic and geometry of the ancient Greeks, the Old World folks like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton? Or the fathers of naturalism, such as Mendel, Linnaeus and Darwin? How about Descartes, Pascal or Fourier? That still leaves an alphabet soup: Anderson, Bohr, Compton, De Broglie, Einstein, Feynman, Gauss, Heisenberg, Joule, Kelvin, Lorentz, Maxwell, Neddermeyer , Oppenheimer, Pauli, Rayleigh , Schroedinger , Thompson , Van der Waals, Wheeler , or Zeeman; and on and on.
Given that science stands on the shoulders of these scientists, a thousand more of noted accomplishments, and countless others who followed them, who among them is the priest? This is precisely what I don't see.
I would think the general perception of religion is that it deals in supernatural absolutes, whereas science deals in nature, and with best evidence as the guide, and subject to change if and when new evidence overturns a previously proven result. It's hard to imagine a more perfect pursuit of truth.
As for society finding science useful: I would think most people, having had at least one science class in the course of growing up, would hold that science is the dry and perhaps boring pursuit of often trivial details though exceedingly complex methods that are hard to grasp through superficial overview. It's hard for me to understand how that bends a person's perspective into the ideation that there is a controlling bureaucracy, or propaganda, if this is what you mean, or any other kind of corruption done generally by scientists at large. All I have ever heard in this regard generally impugns science on account of some fundamental issue like evolution, abortion or climate change, and generally out of the person's objection to science insofar as it clashes with an accepted religious doctrine, particularly as it applies to those issues.
Maybe you are a better spokesperson than others who seem to abhor science to the point of refusing to embrace it as a means of personal growth. You are exploring scientific ideas, so: are you partaking of some kind of poisoned brain food? That's where I can't catch your drift.
Wallace's rejection of the consistency of speed of light in a vacuum, his rejection of the success of the quantum relativistic field description of electromagnetism and his overt embrace of Newton's corpuscular light theory leaves him unable to explain GPS, how electromagnetism causes unlike charges to attract, the Lamb shift, and H. Fizeau's measurement of light in fast-moving dielectrics.
(From the Introduction)
Since 1859, experiments with light and then electrons and then protons has consistently favored Lorentzian space-time over Newtonian absolute space and time or Galilean relativity.Wallace said:
(From Chapter 1)
Here Wallace uses particle in the Newtonian sense and not in the sense of an excitations of a relativistic quantum field which is common to the post-1930 description of both photons and electrons. Rather than pick classical wave or classical particle, modern physics has picked quantum relativistic field and having not grasped this some 60 years later, Wallace is in no position to critique a status quo he can only misrepresent.Wallace said:
In that he is still talking about electromagnetism and the vacuum, Wallace here misrepresents all parts of Big Bang cosmology.Wallace said:
(From Chapter 2, quoting a letter as part of his partizan anti-quark campaign on the basis of a 1976 opinion piece by a Wallace-revered authority)
And yet the facts show (especially from deep elastic scattering) that electrically charged components of the proton do exist, and since 1960 or so, the quark model and quantum chromodynamics have met every test made. Later in this chapter he erroneously comes out in favor of "tired light."Wallace said:
The simplest hypothesis that explains all these positions contrary to observation is that Wallace is a loonie and completely unreliable judge of scientific practice. From his self-documented career, he has a long history of cherry picking authorities and reports at odds with the mainstream and then without basis clinging to those fringe ideas without putting them to the test. He is not able to articulate a basis for clinging to those ideas, and this seems to have hurt his ability to function.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Crank_magnetism
Where, in here, did he disagree with a "well-established empirical fact"? As far as I can tell, he espoused non-standard interpretations of well-established empirical facts, and he based those interpretations on empirical facts.
What he didn't accept is that the speed of light is the same for observers in all frames, and that is not an empirical fact.
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
Which is true for you too.
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
Well he sure isn't open minded about things. I joined his site and he banned me for 5 years for posting facts in my opening post. Literally banned for breaking no rules.
Bwahahahahaha
Keep defending your priesthood, rpenner. You're on a sinking ship!
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
Which facts are those, rpenner, the ones you hold to be true? The ones that are inline with your beliefs? Why should I believe any test results of your experiments when it is shown over and over again that mistakes are made, equipment malfunctions etc. You keep testing till you get a result that you desire and then claim it as a fact?
The main fact to consider with distance and time is the definition of the meter. A plain and simple fact that can't be proven wrong, by definition. No experiment can prove that definition wrong, by definition!
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Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
Absolutely correct!
The preisthood somehow believes that Einstein's second postulate is a law of physics. That is ridiculous. If Einstein believes that to be true and bases his entire theory on that concept, and later that postulate is shown to be false, his theory is garbage!
BTW, Using SR to try and prove that postulate correct is absurd circular logic. In order to defend that postulate you can not use SR. What grounds does the priesthood have to stand on in order to defend that second postulate?
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Sure it is, it is an empirical. Just devise an experiment to show this not to be true and you will be famous.
Good luck.
There has been no observation of the speed of light being the same in different frames, has there?
So, your claim is false. Obviously so, because such an observation would require that relativity be false.
Aqueous Id said:
Aqueous Id, you're saying that that Science doesn't have an elitist element when contrasted with Religion AND AT THE SAME TIME saying that my comparison between the two is an anti-science, denigrating sentiment.
Does it occur to you that not all Scientists see Religion as a competitor, or even a bad thing? I'm neither officially* a Scientist nor am I Religious really in any way; I was simply making a philosophical observation that there are more similarities between the two applied institutions than some may have realized. In the classic "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn, he lays out pretty clearly how, despite our romantic ideal on the subject, the world of Science is just as subject to human imperfections as any other institution.
Uhh, what about Universities, labs, theses, PHDs, peer review, Nobel Prize Committee, I could go on and the comparisons are not that difficult to make.iceaura said:
You guys need to settle down, I'm not attacking Science and, more importantly, SCIENCE DOES NOT NEED DEFENDING BY YOU.
*Regardless of my ability to "do science", I am not considered a Scientist until I'm ordained with a degree.