polyb1123

I only have one god and he is a flying spaghetti monster! Begone ye agent of the invisible unicorn! LOL! Uh, science is a concept/idea and the method is what works albeit not perfectly as well as the fact that it is a human endevour and thus is subject to manipulation and corruption. Your first sentence doesnt even make any sense and demonstrates a bias on your part so from the get go you are discrediting yourself. Worse you are interjecting religious notionalsim which also demonstrates irrationality on your part. NEXT, how much coursework and labwork in physics have you done because if you understand anything about the methods regarding radiometric dating you would know they are fairly reliable but again not perfect and concisely accurate, ie you can get rough orders of magnitude interms of dating! Now I am all for critical thinking regarding science as a topic because that is how we make progress in one respect. But to blindly reject established methods without proper argumentation to discount those methods demonstrates your unwillingness to properly investigate and argue. So, imho, you have failed and in no respect brought anything to the conversation worth noting. Why do you want to waste your time? Do you thik reinforcing an opinion more valuable than figuring out what is true? What is your motivation?

Well this certainly makes for an interesting study regarding confirmation bias and religious propaganda. The fact that it is posing as science and critical thinking demonstrates the dishonesty or irrationality of the author. It also demonstrates how poorly people are being educated, I mean how strongly people are being indoctrinated! I hope one day humanity will reach the age of reason!

I think going back and asking the question "why do conspiracy theories exist in the first place?" is extremely important! One of my issues regarding the topic are the broad and often falllacious generalizations that are made from all sides of the topic. Do people "conspire" to commit crimes? Well, yes they do, otherwise there would be no basis for RICO laws. So it isn't a streatch of the imaganition to say that people are willing to commit such acts regardless of whether they are petty criminals or people who occupy the highests tiers of society, there is plenty of proof for that which I will not need to go into at the moment. On the other hand is there a 'cottage industry' that literally feeds upon people willing to speculate on events outside of the accepted narrative? Again yes, one doesn't need to search around much for proof of that either! So again the question of 'why do conspiracy theories exist in the first place?' needs to be adressed. For myself the answer is simple and obvious: there is a distrust in the narrative that one recieves from an establishment that does have a history of deception and does stand to benefit from such deceptions. So this where it does get difficult because if one wants to find the truth of a given topic one is often put in the untenable position of working through those deceptions coming from seemingly all sides. Worse, people do get things wrong even when they are ruthlessly pursuing truth. Oh boy, I'm not sure if that clarifies anything but it does put into perspective what any of us who care about truth are really up against! So many agendas, so many lies, and so little truth!

The Leidenfrost effect and diping your hamd in molten lead!

January 29 is now being recognized as Thomas Paine day, the day of his birth! So free thinkers, this is the day! http://secularseasons.org/january/thomas_paine.html

I disagree! The principle of inertia is a concept we are all very familiar with. Objects generally do not move unless something comes along and moves it, ie an outside force. Loosely defined, inertia is an objects resistance to change, generally in terms of position. But the problem is that inertia is a concept, an idea. We can't really measure that and thus establish it objectively. But it is something we are all familiar with and can easily accept. So we have to be able to break it down to something we can actually measure if we are going to establish anything objective. From here we invoke momentum, equivelantly interia, as 'mass x velocity' where we can actually measure something. Though mass is trickier to measure and generally abstracted from other measurements, we can directly measure velocity: a change in position with respect to a change in time. This very important! We have something! Now we can go headlong into Newton's laws. I would say that 'mass' is actually harder to define and understand because we cannot directly measure it but we can work around that through the familiar measure of weight. Also this is something we can ascribe to an object. That is a lot easier to contend with than the concept of inertia. But this is where it does become tricky because we are invoking measurements in order to establish objectively concepts like inertia, thus rendering it as a principle! This is the cornerstone of all physics. Even though this tremendously helps us understand objectively the physical world around us it doesn't really help us understand why objects in general resist change! Imho, inertia is a huge mystery and this why the Higgs-boson is so sought after. For quite sometime no one has truly understood the cornerstone principle of inertia which directly ties into the idea of mass! Again, mass is not so simple! One of the problems we do have is that ideas or theories can correspond with observations or measurements but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have the correct ideas. Worse a theory can loosely said to be a description but that does not necessarily help us really understand the phenomena we observe. Again mass has been very useful but the truth is that we really do not understand it. Hence, so goes the theory!

I'm reminded of my experience as an undergraduate student working in the lab on a directed independent research project. One day while a graduate student of my professor was in there with me, we were both looking at a screen that displayed the spectral profile that was hooked up to a detector. Generally what one observed was a scragglly line across the bottom of a graph corresponding to the spectrum being observed. Of course, quite randomly, a spike would pop up and disappear. This lead is into the speculation of what that really was and how the explanation was cosmic particles hitting the detector at random intravels. What really caught my attention was the statement the graduate student made: "... so goes the theory!" I personally relished his statement because it helped me in understanding with all the theoretical descriptions that does go on in physics we are really left with just that: a description. This is vastly different from understanding! But that is how it really is in physics, more often than not to my disappointment. Unfortunately the clarion call of scientific authoritarianism clouds the very simple fact that science is far from complete as a framework for understanding the nature of reality. Worse, it also, imho, is a very dishonest practise because instead of enlitghening people to how reality really works it buries the uninitiated in a fog of incomprehensible description. As far as I am concerned this a great disservice and only serves to secure a position of power for those would be priests of science. The ole knowledge differential used to exploit the less knowledgable. Not to mention this discredits science as a whole, imho. I think it is valid to conclude that there are a lot of irrational scientists out there who promote such irationality because it serves their interest. It has been difficult for me to come to such a conclusion but I can't say there really is much other choice. I do certainly promote crtical thought of science because this is in essence what science is really about! But then again this is more philosophy than science, indeed! Hail Kallista!(LOL!)

"If you think you understand quantum theory . . . you don't understand quantum theory." - attributed to Richard Feynman Quantum mechanics is a very difficult topic to engage mainly because, as i see it, it is so theoretically steeped and abstract that one easily becomes bogged down in the mental gymnastics not to even mention the empirical observations can be really tough to interpret. Its not like the easy, by comparison, empirical and theoretical aspects of classical mechanics. IMHO, to even begin to make an understanding of the topic one has to engage in all the math as well as lab work to really begin see the validity of the theoey. It only gets trickier from there and at that point the vast majority of people are left behind because the sheer magnitude of work necessary to get even to that point! Can one circumvent this hurdle? Not really and it doesnt help that thr market is saturated with laymen books on the topic that really can not convey what the theory describes, knowing the math is absolutely necessary. Its kind of like learning about Mandarin Chinese without studyong the characters, the culture the created it, or practicing the spoken aspects of the language. It is a strange and frustrating prospect. If you want to begin to understand QM the most important thing to try to understand is the ole double slit experiment which established the validity of the wave-particle duality. This is key and is not really understood as Feynman pointed out. So please be cautioned on this topic because there is a lot to know and misunderstand! I personally think avoiding the math and theory will only make it worse not to mention that years of study may not be very helpful either. Though a lot of the layman books may be somewhat helpful or more confusing, the topic is nearly impossible to take without the work one has to put into the math and theory to even get to the point of realizing that no one truly understands it. Good luck and please don't try to confuse yourself more without realizing even with the tools of physics one easily walks away more confounded than not! GOOD LUCK!