Oolite Bulletins

Smivs wrote:

It's all pointless speculation. If anything happens we'll only know when we get there, and there probably won't be much we can do about it anyway.

But that's religion's USP ... we know what happens, and you only get to avoid eternal torment if you follow our simple rules! And pay your subscriptions, that's important.

Of course, there's always this possibility:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2QJvc_SxFQ

People aren't wearing enough hats ...

Disembodied wrote:

... we know what happens

...because some guy made it up hundreds of years ago

Smivs wrote:

...because some guy made it up hundreds of years ago

To be fair, that is (essentially) how I know that E=mc^2 ... I read it in a book. I'm prepared to accept the logic of the system that generated it, and I'm prepared to believe that the people who vouch for it have good reasons to do so, but it's not like I've checked.

This is not to say that I see science as an "equivalent" belief system or anything like that: science works, you can rely on it, and it is evidence-based. It doesn't require faith. But a lot of intelligent people seem perfectly happy to believe in stuff which I can't credit, for reasons I don't understand. Jocelyn Bell Burnell is one example. If she'd been a man she would almost certainly have shared in a Nobel Prize for Physics. I'm not about to tell her she's wrong ...

It is also important to remember that science itself is simply the noticing and finding of the mechanics that make the physical world tick, everything they discover is already there, and many times it has had to rewrite itself in order to take on new learning and discovery.
It is wrong to assume that process is over and that there isn't anything round the corner that might turn it all on it's head again.
Even now science itself says that underneath, everything is energy, and they are struggling with theories such as string theory to explain this in a comprehensible form.
It has also been seen that theories get rejected even if they work but don't fit in with the 'current' theory. Scientists get mocked too.
There is an element of blind faith and speculation to it.
If everything is energy, then why shouldn't life exist in this pure form too?
Maybe it was here before the physical world.
If you want to get philisophical about it

I wonder what the Jedi make of all this?

This is not the thread you're looking for..

Prof Brian Cox was on the radio a few days ago, he put the Science thing rather well I'll paraphrase because I don't remember his exacting wording:

"Science is no built on facts but theories, if we have a theory that works, we keep looking until we find another that supports the first or breaks it, in which case we have to start again and find another theory that works until we break that."

He's also my kind of scientist (my first degree is in Physics) - "I'm not that clever, I'm just inquisitive." (that sums me up pretty well too!)

ZygoUgo wrote:

This is not the thread you're looking for..

Glad someone thought it was funny
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_Hi ... Everything
A beautiful beginners book, some minor mistakes are laid out on the Wiki, (it's possibly a bit out of date too). I love this book.
I rank it just below my bible, (it needs a clean out and an update, but we're still waiting ).

Sorry if that offends anyone