51–60 of 187 posts
That's the best part about science.
The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to scientists on Earth. Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of…
Hmm, fair enough - I checked Wikipedia. My mind completely erased the "sophon" bit or whatever it was called, it just got erased again. Not a fan of that particular fairy dust. I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.
But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet's trajectory for the next thousand years without too many problems. (It would be academic, anyway - if you can build that kind of technology, why do you even need planets?)
And I also hated the sophons.
That's the best part about science.
I am a bit sick of this narrative. That science can make mistakes is in no shape or form, one of its strengths. It is a weakness of the process. The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.
I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all. It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen. Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't t…
One of the boldest chapter one introductions I've ever seen comes to mind: Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. - "States of Matter", David L. Goodstein, https://archive.org/details/statesofmatter0000good_e2n5/page...
I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all. It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.
You dislike that people write for audiences other than yourself.
Science writing for a general audience is really challenging.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
Einstein wanted to measure how fast Earth moves through ether as his research thesis.
Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence. In any case it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
Einstein wanted to measure how fast Earth moves through ether as his research thesis.