Re: [APD] Science

[urville <urville at peoplepc_com>]

I'm having a hard time understanding why you arent understanding.
and
"they should be subject to the 
appropriate negative attention and summarily dismissed. Such is the 
crucible of empirical knowledge, and rightly so."
wtf

okay... i'm done... i have no response to that. are we on a british reality show?

-----Original Message-----
From: Jerry Baker <jerry at bakerweb_biz>
Sent: Nov 2, 2005 11:45 PM
To: aquatic plants digest <aquatic-plants at actwin_com>
Subject: Re: [APD] Science

David Aiken wrote:
> The 'laws' of physics are always subject to revision and they  have  
> been known to be revised on occasion.

Some things are not subject to revision. I have a very difficult time 
understanding why people have a hard time with this. There are some 
things that just are, and they aren't going to change. I suppose it 
ruins possibilities for some, I don't know. Gravity, for instance, is 
precisely predictable in all situations that will be encountered by a 
human. It's never going to change. Ever. Mixing two hydrogen atoms and 
one oxygen atom will yield some heat and water. Always. That's not going 
to change on another planet, and no upstart physicist is going to prove 
it wrong.

> So the person who accepts "laws that have already been established  
> and proven" may not always be in possession of more knowledge than  
> the person who doesn't in relation to an issue at question. It's  
> quite possible, even probable, that they are, but sometimes people do  
> come up with new things that fly in the face of what is accepted, and  
> which revise or replace what has previously been accepted. If the  
> person who does not accept the currently accepted view in your  
> comparison just happens to be the person who really does come up with  
> something new that replaces something currently accepted with a new  
> view of things, then one could quite rightly say that they do know  
> more than the person who accepts laws that have already been  
> established and proven.

If people are going to put forth theories with no hard data or 
observations to back them up, and those theories contradict what is 
currently known about the Universe, they should be subject to the 
appropriate negative attention and summarily dismissed. Such is the 
crucible of empirical knowledge, and rightly so.

> Scientific knowledge doesn't only grow by a simple accretion of new  
> 'facts' and 'laws' that simply get added to whatever 'facts' and  
> 'laws' have already been accepted. Revision occurs also and sometimes  
> what has previously been accepted gets thrown out or modified. We're  
> never in a position to claim that any particular 'fact' or 'law' is  
> the final and complete statement of knowledge on something, simply  
> because we don't know what new discoveries will be found in the future.

That's where you are mistaken. Some things are final. It is true that we 
do not know what discoveries will be made in the future, but we do know 
some of what won't be discovered.

> If Tom is making a claim that disagrees with what is currently  
> accepted, then the onus is rightly on him to prove it, but you can't  
> 'disprove' his proof simply by saying that it disagrees with what is  
> accepted. You have to show that there is a mistake somewhere in the  
> observations and/or deductions he made.

That has been my point all along. I have repeatedly and exasperatingly 
made numerous requests for more details about his experiments and he 
refuses to divulge them. There is no way to analyze observations that 
are kept secret.

-- 
Jerry Baker
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