Chris
03-08-2014, 11:49 AM
10 plus 1 of my favorites...
10 Science Myths That Won’t Go Away (http://time.com/15628/top-10-science-myths/)
...You can kill a virus: No you can’t. You can deactivate it, destroy it, but you can’t kill it. The reason: it wasn’t alive to begin with. One of the requirements for life is the ability to reproduce and the virus is out of luck on that score. It survives only by carjacking a cell first.
...
The dark side of the moon: Pink Floyd, I blame you. For the last time: the moon has no dark side. It does have a far side—which has just the same waxing and waning light the near side does. Album titles ain’t science.
...
If it’s called a theory, it’s the same as a hunch: That’s true sometimes, when you’re just beginning to look into a phenomenon. But after a while, the word merely means that you didn’t actually see the event play out—even if all the evidence tells you what happened. The theory of evolution? A fact. The Big Bang theory? A fact. But unless you’re 13.8 billion years old, you weren’t here to witness it all.
Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place: Lightning actually doesn’t care. Tall buildings get zapped a lot. Park ranger Roy Sullivan was lit up seven times in his career—before committing suicide in 1983. Can you blame him?
...
Primitive humans and dinosaurs crossed paths: Yes, there are people who continue to believe that. No, it’s not true. We were separated by a good 65 million years. Indeed, it’s the extinction of the dinosaurs that made room for little rodent-like mammals (read: your ancestors) to venture out of the shadows and take over the world in the first place. Wilma, we’re home!
One false move and a particle accelerator will kill us all: There was a lot of hand-wringing about this back in 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider was about to be switched on and doomsayers predicted it would create an artificial black hole that would eat Europe. It’s true that some of the most powerful and violent events in the universe are recreated in colliders, but in miniature—a few harmless particles at a time. Relax and enjoy the bosons.
OK, I skipped a few but you can follow the link, I wanted to get to my favorite one on proving things in science, from a slightly different angle...
Can Science Ever Be “Settled”? (https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/433601c3580e)
Gravitation. Evolution. The Big Bang. Germ Theory. Global Warming.
They’re all scientific theories, and they’re all referred to as examples of “settled science” in various circles. Yet, is that even possible? After all, one of the most important cornerstones of science is the willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom. Science advances not merely by accepting the current best explanations as a foregone conclusion, but by testing them, probing them, pushing their limits and looking for gaps. After all, what was once accepted as the consensus position is laughably inadequate in light of our present knowledge and understanding.
http://i.snag.gy/eSH9V.jpg
But hold on. Just because something is open to revision if-and-when new information comes in doesn’t mean there aren’t aspects that have been so rigorously tested — that are so scientifically robust — that they can be considered “settled” or “correct enough” no matter what else we learn.
Many of the examples in the image above, in fact, aren’t good examples of “settled science” by that metric: the idea of a flat Earth was never a scientific theory, neither was the descriptive geocentric model (as science is also prescriptive), and the idea that global cooling was imminent was — despite widespread exposure — never a consensus position. But just because science is continuously challenging itself, assimilating new information, and revising its conclusions, doesn’t mean there aren’t many aspects that can be considered settled, at least at present....
...
The idea that the foundations of science can be shaken so easily by a surprising, reproducible observation or experiment is an important one, but it’s an important one only insofar as it helps separate science from non-science. (Or, if you prefer, pre-science.) At this stage in our understanding of the Universe, scientific revolutions must encompass the success of the previous theories that came before it, which is why general relativity includes Newtonian gravity, and which is why any viable candidate for a quantum theory of gravity must include general relativity (and all of its successful predictions) as a necessity.
When we say the science is settled, we don’t mean that we’ve stopped learning. In fact, we mean the exact opposite: that we have actually learned something valuable. “Settled science” isn’t the end of knowledge, it’s a mark that we’ve begun to legitimately understand something. But remember that the unsettling of settled science is always possible, and we must always keep our mind open to that possibility....
When Einstein was praised for refining Newtonian gravity, he responded someone someday would refine his theory.
10 Science Myths That Won’t Go Away (http://time.com/15628/top-10-science-myths/)
...You can kill a virus: No you can’t. You can deactivate it, destroy it, but you can’t kill it. The reason: it wasn’t alive to begin with. One of the requirements for life is the ability to reproduce and the virus is out of luck on that score. It survives only by carjacking a cell first.
...
The dark side of the moon: Pink Floyd, I blame you. For the last time: the moon has no dark side. It does have a far side—which has just the same waxing and waning light the near side does. Album titles ain’t science.
...
If it’s called a theory, it’s the same as a hunch: That’s true sometimes, when you’re just beginning to look into a phenomenon. But after a while, the word merely means that you didn’t actually see the event play out—even if all the evidence tells you what happened. The theory of evolution? A fact. The Big Bang theory? A fact. But unless you’re 13.8 billion years old, you weren’t here to witness it all.
Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place: Lightning actually doesn’t care. Tall buildings get zapped a lot. Park ranger Roy Sullivan was lit up seven times in his career—before committing suicide in 1983. Can you blame him?
...
Primitive humans and dinosaurs crossed paths: Yes, there are people who continue to believe that. No, it’s not true. We were separated by a good 65 million years. Indeed, it’s the extinction of the dinosaurs that made room for little rodent-like mammals (read: your ancestors) to venture out of the shadows and take over the world in the first place. Wilma, we’re home!
One false move and a particle accelerator will kill us all: There was a lot of hand-wringing about this back in 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider was about to be switched on and doomsayers predicted it would create an artificial black hole that would eat Europe. It’s true that some of the most powerful and violent events in the universe are recreated in colliders, but in miniature—a few harmless particles at a time. Relax and enjoy the bosons.
OK, I skipped a few but you can follow the link, I wanted to get to my favorite one on proving things in science, from a slightly different angle...
Can Science Ever Be “Settled”? (https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/433601c3580e)
Gravitation. Evolution. The Big Bang. Germ Theory. Global Warming.
They’re all scientific theories, and they’re all referred to as examples of “settled science” in various circles. Yet, is that even possible? After all, one of the most important cornerstones of science is the willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom. Science advances not merely by accepting the current best explanations as a foregone conclusion, but by testing them, probing them, pushing their limits and looking for gaps. After all, what was once accepted as the consensus position is laughably inadequate in light of our present knowledge and understanding.
http://i.snag.gy/eSH9V.jpg
But hold on. Just because something is open to revision if-and-when new information comes in doesn’t mean there aren’t aspects that have been so rigorously tested — that are so scientifically robust — that they can be considered “settled” or “correct enough” no matter what else we learn.
Many of the examples in the image above, in fact, aren’t good examples of “settled science” by that metric: the idea of a flat Earth was never a scientific theory, neither was the descriptive geocentric model (as science is also prescriptive), and the idea that global cooling was imminent was — despite widespread exposure — never a consensus position. But just because science is continuously challenging itself, assimilating new information, and revising its conclusions, doesn’t mean there aren’t many aspects that can be considered settled, at least at present....
...
The idea that the foundations of science can be shaken so easily by a surprising, reproducible observation or experiment is an important one, but it’s an important one only insofar as it helps separate science from non-science. (Or, if you prefer, pre-science.) At this stage in our understanding of the Universe, scientific revolutions must encompass the success of the previous theories that came before it, which is why general relativity includes Newtonian gravity, and which is why any viable candidate for a quantum theory of gravity must include general relativity (and all of its successful predictions) as a necessity.
When we say the science is settled, we don’t mean that we’ve stopped learning. In fact, we mean the exact opposite: that we have actually learned something valuable. “Settled science” isn’t the end of knowledge, it’s a mark that we’ve begun to legitimately understand something. But remember that the unsettling of settled science is always possible, and we must always keep our mind open to that possibility....
When Einstein was praised for refining Newtonian gravity, he responded someone someday would refine his theory.