Relativity of Science

Now see Carleas, there it goes and by one of your own moderators no less, the “appeal to pejorative judgment to enhance disrepute”, a form of “name calling”.

And who specifically is it being used to defend? Not Science in general as one is intended to accept, but specifically the famed QM, the Quantum Magi. These are the very people we have to thank for such pseudo-science (“crack-pot” theories) as “M-theory”, “string theory”, “superstring theory”, “4th dimension”, “11 dimensional space”, “Bubble universes”, “Time Travel Theory”, “Wormholes to alternate spaces and universes”, and dozens more. EVERY ONE of which has ZERO empirical evidence (the supposed foundation of Science) and also can be logically disproven.

Yet these theories coming from a specific cult are considered a part of Science and force fed to children in public schools and media. Oh, but not “God”, that theory is just silly. At least the God theory cannot be logically DISproven, ALL of the Quantum Magi theories can be disproven, although one might need to brush up on a little Rational Metaphysics.

Get onto any Science forum and these things are allowed to be discussed as though they had any real foundation at all. And try to argue against them and you are a “crackpot”.

Xunzian, thank you for proving my point.

That is exactly my experience. A documentary was made about that very thing showing the condemning evidence. I spoke directly to a person pointed out in the film as one of the “conspirators”. While talking to him, not realizing this publication manager was in fact the person in the film, he proved his own guilt of pre-judging and selecting people based on whether they ever spoke out of line. “We have to defend Science against the crackpots and religious people” - his very words. Yet provable “crackpots” are the ones getting the most publicity.

Interesting development here with me being in the middle-literally.

Given that there is a preponderance of examples of people who have espoused controversial theories and then gone on to achieve tenure, I’m inclined to think that the people complaining about the biases within the system are doing so because they couldn’t cut the mustard. Rather than admit their own failures, they’ve created boogie-men who oppressed them and keep their truth down.

If you can demonstrate it, the community will come around to it. Look at Woese. It took him quite some time to demonstrate that the dominant paradigm was wrong. But, after he provided sufficient evidence his view was accepted and became orthodox. That is one example of many.

But even Woese’s “crackpot” theory would only score a 6 on the crackpot index. That is rather different from something reaching into the 30s and beyond . . .

Once again I find myself agreeing with Xun.

Let me just add that scientific theories are mental models that can help us predict and/or gain some insight into what we observe… they are not supposed to be absolute truthes nor perfect representations of reality, but rather the most useful and insightful ideas we can produce to explain the data that we have.

To argue that it’s wrong to think of them as absolute truthes seems a bit redundent, as no one seems to be claiming otherwise.
But to argue that because they are not absolute truthes, that we should therefor chuck them out the window or be extra receptive to utterly untested ideas, seems downright stupid to me.
If you happen to have a theory that does a better job of explaining OBSERVABLE phenomena, then that’s a hard thing to ignore, as ignoring it would be like shaving with a sharp rock instead of a razor.
However, unless you have a better “mind tool” or “theory”, we’d best stick to the ones we have… imperfect as they may be.
As a sharp rock beats bare handed ripping!

Farsight, I don’t know what physicsforums policies are about what merits banning, but if what you say is true they are draconian and probably stifle potentially fruitful discussions. My guess, though, is that they probably get a lot of genuinely disruptive posters insisting that some out-of-mainstream idea is going to revolutionize physics, and that as a result they are hyper-sensitive to removing those posters before they become a problem. The “crackpot index” that Xunzian regretfully employed is further evidence that whatever the frequency of suppression in physics, there is certainly no shortage of people who are just wrong. (I’d also like to clarify that, thankfully for everyone involved, Xunzian is only a temporary moderator while TheStumps is on leave. He is also a drunken old coot who’s comments shouldn’t be given too much weight. :wink: )

As for anecdotes about people being encouraged not to do anything radical, I have a few thoughts. First, they are anecdotes and, even those from Nobel Laureates (Farsight, I assume the second link was supposed to go to the article by Josephson?), while suggestive of a strain of thought within the physics community, are not necessarily evidence that it is a major strain, let alone the predominant strain.

James, none of the theories you propose are part of accepted science. They’re all proposed theories to account for various observed phenomena, and though they haven’t been disproven, most are as yet untested (mostly because a test has not been devised that is practical and that would distinguish between competing theories). The theories make assumptions, but that is not a problem in science when the assumption is acknowledge, is made about a legitimately undecided question, and is used to make predictions which could potentially be tested.

Nor are these theories being “force fed to children in public schools.” Superstring theory, if it mentioned at all, they are mentioned as a footnotes to get kids exciting about interesting questions currently facing science (which is certainly what these theories represent). Anecdotally, my own formal physics education, which began in public school and went up through college-level modern physics, never dealt with any of these theories, except the 4th dimension (when dealing with spacetime in special relativity). Especially considering the recent test-centric shift in public education, I would be shocked if any part of the curriculum in mandatory public education dealt with anything more involved than non-quantum electricity and magnetism.

One thing I think it’s important to keep in mind is that it’s very easy to come up with radically divergent proposed theories in any discipline of science, and that almost all of them will be wrong. Again, I think the attribution of malice and intentional suppression, even of significant closed-mindedness, doesn’t take into account the probable volume of actually inane theories. Even if, for example, the review process for posting on arXiv.org is extremely accurate, and the reviewers are reasonably open to challenges to some foundational tenet of a discipline, the flow of truly useless theories could quite easily be so large that some legitimate proposals would be lost in the deluge. Most of the time, when the scientific bureaucracy attempts to “defend [s]cience against the crackpots,” they will be right to do so, because most theories labeled ‘crackpot’ are truly not scientifically interesting in the least. (This point is to say nothing of theories presented here, rather it is meant generally of the entire landscape of conceivable ‘radical’ theories)

I could present much more extensive evidence to show without much doubt at all that Science is being used as a religion to the populus, but in most cases, such evidence involves extensive thought and education before the conclusion can be drawn. That means that those thoughts are a bit useless on a forum like this.

I considered going through a long explanation as to what it really takes to legitimately consider someone to be paranoid, delusional, or any signs of being an unthinking “crackpot”, but that takes too much explanation. Xunzian’s “test” can easily be exposed for the fraud it is with such prior education.

But there is one thought that is fairly simple;

If you look at the Stopped Clock Paradox and examine it for logical presentation and evidence of supernatural, magical, or fantasy speculations, does it appear to be presented rationally? Actually I expected that to be what anyone would do as they merely took on the challenge of resolving it. But even without attempting a resolve, does it appear to be irrationally presented? It takes no real physics or higher math to understand it. It sets up a simple situation wherein relativity demands certain results. But if those results are true, then the clocks have to both stop and also not stop. Thus by using relativity, a logical paradox is presented.

For three pages, PhysBang, Calrid, and Xunzian spouted pejoratives concerning me, yet not one shred of thought actually went into the actual setup or following logic posted in the OP other than to say, "SR doesn’t work like that, you are “ignorant”, “insane”, “mentally ill”, “crackpot”… Creating ill repute was the obvious aim.

Now if it true that the OP actually was presented in a rational manner, whether a mistake was made or not, where is the excuse for such pejorative explicatives? And who are really the one(s) displaying what appears to be merely religious fanaticism (“crackpotedness”)?

But the issue isn’t one of personal guilt, rather one of common behavior within the populous. As pointed out by various posters, the populous is “the problem” in that they make things into religions. But they are the ones in charge of the show and spreading the religion of scientism, unless you believe that upper elite managers are keeping them all inline and out of decision making. But if that were the case, how is there so much turmoil on so very many issues regarding corporations, banks, politics, medicine, and just about everything mankind does? Aren’t those people "the populous?

Maybe members could have some engaging off-topic discussions in this thread, but the rational of James’ point can be disregarded by pointing out a single very basic flaw, which Carleas has already done–with admirable patience–several times, from several angles.

First:

Very simple.

“Science” can be defined (can be and is) in various ways, but every rational definition of science–every meaning that stresses that which distinguishes it from that which is not science– is based on (and is only actually understood in the context of the primary goal of) being able to know that (a given condition) A (reliably) results in B.

That is all science is. The only goal/ideal (inherent in its meaning) is acquiring the knowledge necessary to know what reliably (and necessarily) precedes and proceeds some phenomenon.

Man may do/use science with(/in light of) or for their own motivations and values, but if the process (their collecting data, doing experiments and interpreting their conclusions, making hypothesis, etc.) results in the reliable knowledge that A (in some condition) causes B, it is “Science”, plain and simple; one’s beliefs and values have an affect on what they choose to understand (and predict, manipulate and bring about) with science, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the science (which is judged solely on the value of reliably predicting the necessary causes and/or inevitable effects of some A).

This so clearly demonstrates that James isn’t going to take in any valid criticism of his point (in this thread, at least…).

Carleas points out that James is making the mistake of focusing his criticism on “Science”–saying “science does this” and “science does that”, when those criticisms don’t apply to science; his use(s) of the word (“Science”) don’t even make sense, given the coherent, communicable meaning of Science (based on a systematic knowledge leading to predictions of phenomenon).

James replies “That is exactly my point”, but it wasn’t. He alters his arguments slightly afterwards, differentiating an “ideal” of science as the “true” science, but it’s clear he only obtained a surface understanding of Carleas’ criticisms.

It’s ironic…James’ point results from his observations of scientists (and other “credible” sources of “science news”) making irrational or biased statements, “supporting” them with statements like “science tells us that…” and “based on scientific evidence”–this does happen, and it is a valid criticism (science doesn’t “say” anything except B reliably results from conditions A).

However, he suffers from the same problem he is trying to criticize–people say “Science shows… blah blah” when science doesn’t show that; it is their own metaphysical story they read from the data. Also “Scientific” is used synonymously with “rational” (not using faith), so that people can call metaphysical stories/myths (of ultimate purpose and absolute morality) “scientifically-supported” “reality”, which they believe because A) traditional uses of “faith”/“religion” place their focus on things that can’t be observed–deemed “real” regardless of culture and B) science only focuses on things that are.

Basically… the “secular” trend towards values is against (and was intended to be the solution to) the social/collective basing one’s actions according to a moral code “given” by a supernatural being (because these derive from texts written in ancient closed societies/cultures that don’t apply to a multicultural community–there can’t be any social stability/sense of security if people are operating according to radically different value systems).

So, at its base is first an assumption of what is “bad”–treating an unseen (and unfalsifiable) non physical concept as “real”, and operating (in a multicultural society) according to that, as well as the ignorance responsible to do so while thinking anyone who disagrees with them is wrong.
So then their “good” is “rationality”, but as an absolute this only has meaning by it not being the irrationality of focusing on a not physical reality. So “good” is knowing about phenomenon.

The “purpose” of life, many of them then assume, is simply physical existence itself (because that is the good, the NOT imaginary/fantasy/not “real”), so a lot of them live by the value of vague concepts like “natural”, or that whatever makes one live longest, or have sex or be “alpha”.

The problem is their insisting that anything in the physical world, and scientific facts about it, proves a purpose to any of it, and demonstrates what is right and was is wrong. The “not physical/imaginary” being they fail to take into account is their own interpretation and conceptualization of things.

James could have made a point on how people often misuse the word “science”, and end up making the same errors of certainty science is used to prevent, but instead he made the same mistake of using it without a clear, coherent definition. Merely deeming “science” as irrational because a couple people used the word (improperly) that way.

madhatter, Carleas, and anyone else, look at the OP. Does it say even one word about Science?

It is a conversation comparison between an atheist and a Christian versus an absolutist and a relativity conformist.

It said nothing at all about what Science is or isn’t. It is a display of how the issues concerning Science and the issues concerning religion are parallel or “related”.

If you are going to complain about my views on Science in general despite me not really displaying them except by your presumptions, then I am going to have to complain that you stick to the actual topic.

Prove it. Show me an experiment that disagrees with realitivity, actually show me anything other than a priori logic word salad and that would be a start?

:smiley:

Evolution is more of a religion even than relativity, since there is almost 100% agreement with that. Hence all science is about religious convictions not evidence. Relativity is a religion, if I agree with you will you shut up with all this preposterous tosh?

Probably not, but ho hum. :-"

Actually, it was demonstrated several times in that thread that 1) you fundamentally did not understand the system you were trying to discredit and 2) given 1, the “contradiction” you identified did not apply. In keeping with a trend also seen in this thread, you then engaged in revising the original paradox without acknowledging it, going so far as to edit the original post fundamentally changing the paradox while claiming the entire time that is what you actually meant. On top of that, even with the disingenuous edit, you still did not understand the system you were objecting to as evidenced by numerous citations which you rejected as “appeals to authority”. It would seem as though the only “science” you recognize comes from your own brain. That is a rather limiting perspective and not one that engenders fruitful conversation.

I’m not sure how they are these days, but they seemed to make full use of the wackier posters and the tender-young-minds card as an excuse to stifle sincere discussion. The impression I got was that no questioning of consensus was tolerated, no challenge to the mainstream was permitted, and that the moderators didn’t so much ensure civil discourse as serve as thought-police. Perhaps we could test this out with an experiment? Here’s a thread concerning the speed of light. Try posting up the quoted section of this post along with what I said about Shapiro and light clocks here, and gauge their response. If your post is deleted and you find yourself banned, I’m probably right. If you receive a rational counter-argument with references and experimental evidence, I’m probably wrong.

Apologies, no, it was a link to a hostile piece in the Guardian by Simon Jenkins drawing a parallel between science and religion. Here it is: guardian.co.uk/commentisfree … of-science

That’s the given reason, but there have been some issues re blacklisting, see for example this physicsworld item, and this “archive freedom” case histories. By chance I emailed one of the names on the list in July asking him why he had no recent papers, and his reponse was “I have been trying hard but unsuccessfully to get a couple of important paper published”. This is a professional physicists, an academic, not just some kid with an ill-considered notion.

I agree with your sentiment, but feel you should be attacking things like time travel and parallel worlds and the other examples from your previous post, not relativity. Only this week New Scientist presented parallel worlds as fact. The latter is arguably a science media issue rather than a science establishment issue, but I’d say there is a grey area here.

This limited perspective on science is a very common occurrence with those who object rather strongly to science or specific sciences: they object to science that they have clearly not read.

Before Internet 2.0, such people were limited to writing letters to people who worked in the sciences, letters to conferences about the sciences, and then later emails to people who worked in the sciences. (I was late enough on the scene that I only received the latter two.) Now internet forums are the place to go.

The standard reply on these people is that they are being kept out of the scientific discourse because of some social institution. Though, in truth, the social institution that they could be involved with is their local library; the library would provide the material they need to actually answer their questions.

I’m not sure about PhysicsForums, but another good example of Farsight’s behaviour when people who actually know science are involved can be found at the Bad Astronomy/Universe Today Forums. Farsight was also banned there.

Farsight’s thread:
bautforum.com/showthread.php … highlight=

Final offence:
bautforum.com/showthread.php … ost1642935

Suspensions:
bautforum.com/showthread.php … ost1628425
bautforum.com/showthread.php … ost1632224
bautforum.com/showthread.php … ost1643015

In general, many people too often the supposed presence and extent of some cabal of censors is used in the place of actually delivering analysis.

Caldrid, why do you care if he keeps posting? If there truly is a flaw in his argument, explain what it is. If you’re sick of explaining, simply walk away from the thread in question. Nothing is compelling you to continue dealing with his “preposterous tosh,” why not just add him as a foe and be done with it?

PhysBang, sometime, somewhere, a question will be posed first on an internet forum that has real merit, and which can’t be answered in a library. If you can’t provide the explanation for why a theory is wrong, aren’t you taking it on faith that the answer is in the library? I agree with you that almost all (something like “all-1”) theories proposed to radically revise science, whether on a forum or elsewhere, will be proven to be wrong, and adequate research would lead any reasonable individual to reject them. But there’s value in discussing an incorrect theory. In researching James’ Clock Paradox, I refreshed my memory of relativity, and learned about new positions worth considering (like four-dimensionalism). Conversely, there doesn’t seem to be any harm in proposing an incorrect theory, and certainly it’s better than believing it and never discussing it, thereby never being corrected.

Farsight, arXiv gets about 6000 submissions a month, about 200 a day. With that volume, there are bound to be some mistakes made. In a year, if 5 submissions are mistakenly rejected, their process is still accurate to four decimal places. Since few if any write editorials to explain the system that accurately evaluated their paper, the press will overvalue these 5 mistakes, but to suggest that it can be otherwise is dubious.

Jenkins’ article is more about the politics of science, balancing science as a national priority against other goods. But the question of if or how government should fund science is very different from the question of whether the institution of science excludes legitimate theories because they go against the mainstream. Jenkins does touch on the latter, but the brunt of his argument, and virtually all his evidence, goes to the former.

Matthatter, as simple as science is, I think it’s legitimate to refer to the institutions of science as “science”. And there is a legitimate question as to whether the institution is effectively producing reliable statements of the type “A (reliably) results in B,” and not illegitimately excluding other reliable statements.

That said, it seems clear to me that institutional science is doing an adequate job.

James, the major difference between scientific faith and religious faith is that, where religion is set up from top to bottom to bolster such faith and actively and openly discourage dissension, science is set up from top to bottom to shun faith. Of course, as you have said, people are by nature religifiers, but that doesn’t support the contention that science and religion are similar because of it any more than does the observation that both religious and scientific beliefs are both written in ink.

As to your proof (and straying off topic), you assume that the flash occurs simultaneously for both frames of reference, but such simultaneity is relative, and won’t be the same for both the station and the train. A possible resolution is that the clock on the train is stopped, and the observers at the station are wondering why the flash went off late (early?). If you assume simultaneity, you have assumed an internally inconsistent premise, and as a result you arrived at an inconsistent conclusion.

Well thank you and that is the exact argument that I was first expecting someone to make. And if they had, I would have presented my reply which clearly (I think) displays that the simultaneity is unquestionable.

The fact that we couldn’t even get to such a point (although for a moment I thought that is where PhysBang was headed) is what inspired this thread. My response to that reply is only vaguely mentioned during the thread because I thought PhysBang was going there. My entire explanation addressing that concern is still not posted, because no one seemed to be interested in the reasoning or Science, but rather mere “religious fanaticism” techniques already well known in anti-religion debates.

I would disagree that “from top to bottom” Science is setup to resist faith. That was the obvious original altruistic version of Science. You and many are not aware of just how much that prior state has been so corrupted that it is no longer the case in reality.

But thank you for pointing out that even if my proposed paradox was in error, the whole point to such posts is to bring out the actual logic involved no matter who is wrong or right, not merely blindly point to the holy scriptures (“Go drink our coolaid and you will begin to begin to see the same colors that we see.”).

As to your implication of me being a liar by altering the scenario;

The only editing done was in effort to make things more clear sense it was obvious to me that the actual scenario wasn’t being seen. I corrected typos, moved commas, added parentheticals, adjectives, and a final “Summary of the Setup”, and made many attempts to get the pictures more clear. The actual paradoxical situation wasn’t changed a bit. And frankly even if it had been, a paradox is a paradox and needs attention.

But then seeing that no one was willing or apparently qualified to actually address the paradox, I decided to go ahead and resolve it myself. As it turned out, that didn’t take quite as long as I was expecting and quickly realized that the issue was merely that the observed speed of light cannot be perfectly constant, although can easily be mistaken as such. Science has noted that Einstein equations get them closer than the QM had proposed, but still not perfectly on.

As a result, I then modified my own proposed solutions as outlined in the logic table list of possible outcomes to change the reference to the general term “relativity” to the more specific term, “the speed of light” as it turned out that the assumed consistency of the observed speed of light was at the bottom of the conundrum. I can now even correct for the real time dilation with more precision than what Einstein had proposed. The new time dilation equations would correct for the tiny bit of error still noted in actual experiments. Even Einstein knew that something was still not entirely right.

But the proposed paradox never changed at all.

The OP is not about Science? What about the title of your topic?

I can’t help watching someone bravely taking on all comers, regardless of whether he’s right or wrong.

My behaviour can be assessed by reading the threads, PhysBang. It’s good behaviour.

All: for the record, this is the only other place I’ve been banned from, and it’s a particularly graphic example of online censorship. Check the offence/suspension links above and you’ll see I was suspended for “refusing to answer questions” thence banned for being “uncivil”. But when you read the posts, you can see I answered over 100 questions, and was a model poster faced with a barrage of insults. Here’s where I got up to the 75th question from just one poster: post #103. I was warned in advance that the trick at Baut when faced with a serious challenge backed with evidence and references is to to hurl a barrage of specious questions then give infractions for not answering questions, and to hurl abuse and penalise any retort in kind. But I decided to go ahead, and feel it was a useful exercise.