51–60 of 69 posts
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You don’t need any observations at all to build up a complete knowledge of the entire universe. Hegel showed this
Quantum physics from no observations? With your monkey brain? Yeah right.
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We can literally observe cosmic microwave background and it fits our prediction that the universe was denser and hotter. It is a scientific theory. You might be confusing the established big bang with the more speculative cosmic inflation model. They're very closely related.
> We can literally observe cosmic microwave background and it fits our prediction that the universe was denser and hotter. I can't observe that, because I don't have the gear. (Nor the time, budget, inclination nor training, for that matter. :-) But I am happy to admit the possibility that some of those observations, as reported in the literature, are correct. However, unlike a depressingly large percentage of my for…
The black body distribution of the CMB is the (confirmed, of course) prediction of the Big Bang. The structure, age, etc. all depend on the cosmological model, and the claims that no such model can explain observations is ridiculous, given the counterexample of the \Lambda CDM model, the cornerstone of the field for decades now, that explains them all.
It's almost impressive how obstinately you've convinced yourself of something so blatantly wrong and out of date, using only a reference predating the entire modern era of cosmology that you even admitted to not having read "for a while." A far, far cry from engaging seriously in a topic.
Like with the frontier LLMs, seeing commentary on this site on topics that I'm an expert in makes me seriously doubt whether I should lend any credence at all to what's said about those that I'm not.
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how is this at all related to TFA
Gravity experiments? Easier to do accurately in lower gravity environments, like away from the Earth? And we just so happen to have a nearly permanent laboratory in orbit, which was built and is maintained at tremendous taxpayer expense? I thought this would be obvious from TFA. I should have been more explicit.
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It might also be nice if cosmologists stopped claiming their Big Bang "Theory" wasn't more accurately termed a mere Hypothesis. IIRC, 12 out of 13 predictions failing and necessitating "model" "tweaks" is not a fantastic track record for a Theory, which are supposed to robustly survive investigation.
The model failing is a question of how accurately you want it to model the world. Many laypersons have absolutely no conception of how accurate those "failing" models were. A good example is Newtonian physics. Strictly speaking it is a failing model, after all, under certain conditions and if you look very closely ot falls apart. Yet, every bridge you ever walked on and the most precise mechanical watches ever made w…
Take for example Lord Kelvin's model of thermal conduction in a solid Earth. He used it to incorrectly predict the age of the Earth, but if he had taken that failure to heart he could have used it to predict mantle convection and plate tectonics.
I appreciate the scientists’ honesty. When asked about big G and time invariance, he says he just takes it on faith that it has been the same forever. If more people would admit their leaps I think the theistic schism would be far more shallow.
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> We can literally observe cosmic microwave background and it fits our prediction that the universe was denser and hotter. I can't observe that, because I don't have the gear. (Nor the time, budget, inclination nor training, for that matter. :-) But I am happy to admit the possibility that some of those observations, as reported in the literature, are correct. However, unlike a depressingly large percentage of my for…
I think you have too high an expectation of the scientific community. People work there, and it will have people's dramas and problems, like everywhere else: fraud, crime, jealousy, simple mistakes, etc. Despite their imperfections, the reason people with power trust their consensus more is because they are a lot more useful than other groups of people. If you reject this statement, you can start by joining the Amish…
Indeed, I did. I joined expecting it to be above mere politics. I paid for my folly.
> People work there, and it will have people's dramas and problems, like everywhere else: fraud, crime, jealousy, simple mistakes, etc.
Yes, but it's far worse in the scientific communities. In the "real world" the average person is way better at doing their average job than the average scientist publishing their work.
Imagine even a civilizationally incompetent modern society today (without naming any names). Now imagine what it would be like if >50% of the time you got into a taxi something far worse than the expected result occurred. You got: taken to the wrong destination; or cheated by the driver; or woke up in a bathtub missing your kidneys; etc. Extend that behavior to even a tiny fraction of the whole. That society would have collapsed already.
Compare that to any journal you please and let's see what percentage of their published works can be verified. Even for the "better" fields their rates are shockingly bad. Some are below 50%.
I don't know about you, but my standards for the behavior of scientists are considerably higher than that for taxi drivers.
> Despite their imperfections, the reason people with power trust their consensus more is because they are a lot more useful than other groups of people.
Hard disagree. The reason people with power "trust" scientific consensus is because they manufacture that consensus by controlling the funding. This is fact. It's not pleasant, and is far from uncontroversial. But it is what it is.
The people with power today who are telling you that is "settled science" are the spiritual (and in some cases genetic!) descendants of the people who were telling Columbus that he was going to sail off the edge of the Earth and locking up Galileo. Eppur si muove!
If you want to naively believe that calling one's self a big-s Scientist makes one, if not immune then perhaps we could say resistant, to that fraud, crime, corruption, etc. then I suppose you're entitled to that opinion. I look at the data on their output and my vote is to trash the lot of them and start over. They've fallen that far from grace.
I'm inclined to trust the ancient Greeks, sure. Modern scientists, not so much.
> If you reject this statement, you can start by joining the Amish, since virtually all modern technology is built on top of the scientific community's consensus and work.
Unfortunately the Amish are automatically suspicious of the academically tainted such as myself. Otherwise I'd love to chill with them. Their lives are blissfully stress-free compared to ours.
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The theistic schism? I had to look it up, and was not cleverer after. Nobody can ever know an ultimate why, for obvious and well established philosophical reasons. At least the scientists are trying to squeeze the knowledge gap down as small as possible instead of making up stories.
> Nobody can ever know an ultimate why, for obvious and well established philosophical reasons Yes we can, you are just presupposing that philosophy is ultimately ineffective. For example Hegel gave a presuppositionless development of all metaphysics among other things. It’s not some kind of philosophical consensus that ultimate justification is impossible
Abstract This paper is the third and final one in a sequence of three. All three papers emphasize that a proposition can be justified by an infinite regress, on condition that epistemic justification is interpreted probabilistically. The first two papers showed this for one-dimensional chains and for one-dimensional loops of propositions, each proposition being justified probabilistically by its precursor. In the present paper we consider the more complicated case of two-dimensional nets, where each ‘child’ proposition is probabilistically justified by two ‘parent’ propositions. Surprisingly, it turns out that probabilistic justification in two dimensions takes on the form of Mandelbrot’s iteration. Like so many patterns in nature, probabilistic reasoning might in the end be fractal in character.
https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8961/1/Fractal_Patterns_of_...
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Philosophy can be perfectly effective as a tool of thought while still being unable to resolve self evidently unsolvable “ultimate questions”
It can resolve them though
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how is this at all related to TFA
Gravity experiments? Easier to do accurately in lower gravity environments, like away from the Earth? And we just so happen to have a nearly permanent laboratory in orbit, which was built and is maintained at tremendous taxpayer expense? I thought this would be obvious from TFA. I should have been more explicit.