Quote: roscoff @ February 22 2009, 12:35 PM GMTMark 3:24
And Jesus stood on the runwayAnd looked into the throng
And asketh them
Where has thy Jumbo Jet gone?
Things you bragged about at school but never did.. Page 5
Quote: DaButt @ February 23 2009, 12:32 AM GMTScience that conforms with the laws of physics and mathematics is as close as you can get to absolute truth.
Until something else is discovered which furthers our knowledge and disproves previous 'facts'.
But that's why current science is always the closest we can get to truth. Because science has no sentimentality or element of faith it's always the closest man kind has got to truth.
Quote: Aaron @ February 23 2009, 12:41 AM GMTUntil something else is discovered which furthers our knowledge and disproves previous 'facts'.
You can't easily disprove mathematics, and that's what everything is based upon.
Quote: DaButt @ February 23 2009, 12:46 AM GMTYou can't easily disprove mathematics, and that's what everything is based upon.
You also can't rely on mathematics as the ultimate "safe" logic. There are countless mathematical anomalies that are yet to be solved, (and may never be solved) by humans. So surely, these in themselves are mysteries outside our current understanding. Paranormal, some might say.
You mentioned James Randi's 1 million dollar "reward" for proof of the paranormal. Funnily enough there's also another 1 million dollar reward offered for proof of the unknown. It's by the Clay Mathematics Institute, in return for solving an equation known as the P = NP Problem. I don't for one instant pretend to know the answer myself (or even fully understand the question) but there it is, 1 million dollars to solve a mathematical equation, and nobody has yet claimed the prize.
Seems mathematics isn't quite as "safe" as people would like it to be.
Quote: Lee Henman @ February 23 2009, 3:19 AM GMTYou also can't rely on mathematics as the ultimate "safe" logic. There are countless mathematical anomalies that are yet to be solved, (and may never be solved) by humans. So surely, these in themselves are mysteries outside our current understanding. Paranormal, some might say.
No, there are a few unsolved math problems that will be eventually be proven using accepted techniques. Nobody will have to change the laws of physics and no pieces of metal will have to be bent.
Quote: DaButt @ February 23 2009, 12:46 AM GMTYou can't easily disprove mathematics, and that's what everything is based upon.
Now YOU'RE the one changing the discussion entirely. So to follow down this murky path, mathematics may one day prove - or at least show the possibility of - some of the phenomena that you're so bluntly and readily rubbishing.
Quote: Aaron @ February 23 2009, 9:00 AM GMTNow YOU'RE the one changing the discussion entirely. So to follow down this murky path, mathematics may one day prove - or at least show the possibility of - some of the phenomena that you're so bluntly and readily rubbishing.
Not changing the subject at all. Physics - and the laws that define it - all boils down to mathematics. Said laws have been proven mathematically and they sneer in the face of spoon benders and mind movers - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF WHOM HAS BEEN PROVEN TO BE A FRAUD WHEN SCRUTINIZED BY SCIENTISTS.
I don't know what's right or wrong. All I know is Uri Gellar has a car covered in spoons. Now you can't argue with that.
Quote: Leevil @ February 23 2009, 11:56 AM GMTI don't know what's right or wrong. All I know is Uri Gellar has a car covered in spoons. Now you can't argue with that.
He's both fraudy and gaudy.
Who's the biggest bender?
Quote: Leevil @ February 23 2009, 12:04 PM GMTWho's the biggest bender?
Like Uri Geller, Michael Jackson is an accomplished magician. He's made his entire career vanish.
Quote: DaButt @ February 23 2009, 5:29 AM GMTNo, there are a few unsolved math problems that will be eventually be proven using accepted techniques. Nobody will have to change the laws of physics and no pieces of metal will have to be bent.
Well this has been an interesting debate but I'm going to bow out of it now, otherwise DaButt and I may unwittingly cause the old "two immovable forces colliding" paradox, causing the entire universe to implode.
I will say though, that to live in a world without mystery or the notion that there may be other forces beyond the reach of our normal five senses seems a very bleak outlook to me. And to suggest that everything can be explained by science is nonsense anyway. The whole current scientific understanding of how we, the Universe and everything came into being is that billions of years ago, the Universe was a big empty space with a tiny particle of superdense matter at its centre. Nobody knows why it was there. Nobody knows how it got there. Nobody knows what was there before it. Then that tiny particle exploded (nobody knows why) and from that particle came all the countless trillions of galaxies and stars and planets that we see in the sky today.
Now...if you look at that objectively, without the shackles of accepted scientific wisdom, it actually sounds like a far-fetched kid's fairytale. It's a pretty big pill to swallow, isn't it? But swallow it we do, because science tells us to. Just like science once told people the Sun revolved around the Earth (which was flat by the way).
Science makes mistakes all the time. That's how it grows and improves, by learning from its mistakes. In his relativity equations, Einstein created a cosmological constant that stated the Universe was static and not moving. He was proved wrong. In his own words "It was the greatest blunder of my life".
To be a true advocate of science, you also have to have an open mind to possibilities that are beyond our current understanding. Because if one thing is guaranteed, we can't explain everything, and we never will.
I'm cut both ways here.
Agree. Science is as close to the truth as we can get. But it isn't the total truth. Science is littered with examples of personal agenda, deception, and downright lies.
Haeckel spawned a theory, held for decades, before it was discovered he'd doctored his results. The fabled peppered moth 'proof' was fake, the researcher pinned dead moths to trees to prove a point. Scientists said smoking was bad for you, good for you, or neither, depending on who was paying their research grant. Only one position was true, the other scientists were self-deceptive or worse, deceiving a public that continued developing avoidable cancers. In regards to death, a costly scientific war to rival most political examples. These are some of many notable examples.
When faced with a test result that disproves your position, it's a practice (in some "highly-motivated" circles) to reduce the samples, to change the question, or the experiment, to get the desired result.
Take quantum physics where the observer's personal expectation changes the experiment's result. The quantum level shreiks a hint that we actually live in a vague shifting shadow world that only has the appearance of being concrete. Our personal beliefs are often more important than evidence backing it, because if we believe in something, we'll eventually find our evidence.
I love science but I'm not blind to human nature either. Believe science is pure, unadulterated, and deviod of human emotion, faith, or personal bias, and you'll conveniently ignore dead moths, faked drawings, and personal agenda.
Faith is littered through every human life. When you believe something told to you by others, without personally examining it for yourself, you exercise faith. If you examine it for yourself and accept what your limited senses tell you is the totality of truth then you again exercise faith. Everyone exercises faith. The difference is that the object of that faith varies.
Agreed, there is an absolute truth but we feeble beings only glimpse small parts of it because, while mankind is more interested in creating converts to causes (political / religious / and scientific too), truth is just a bystander shrouded by deceptions, our feeble restricted sensory organs, and our personal belief systems.
Beware being inflexible or dismissive. No person holds 100% of the truth available to man, and man possesses just a fraction of the total truth. Our senses are deceptive and limited, and there lies Science's fatal flaw. We can't percieve the imperceptible and so huge areas of knowledge will never be available to us.
As to Lee's example: my mind says one thing (that it couldn't happen in the real world) but I can't easily discount his personal recollection without discounting his integrity. But my belief system is not so small or inflexible as to rule out other explanations for the account. My explanation may not be the same as Lee's, mine is most likely not even right, but it settles the conflict in my mind... temporarily.
I echo Lee's comments re: modern fairy tale in his last post but also found the idea that Mary being impregnated by a ghost and the cosmic 'pixie being' as mocking the beliefs of others in a contradictory way, while defending the right to his own beliefs from slightly less patronising questions.
The clips might have moved but they were still stationery.