Flat earthers are crazy

Obviously the observations don't produce the testable theories, but Newton managed it for the - then - entirely observational science of astronomy.

John Larkin is just being ignorant here - not for the first time - and is displaying a relentless unwillingness to learn.

John Larkin has yet to learn that working now is no guarantee of not failing later. It's the standard right-wing fallacy - what was good for Bastiat in 1850 is still just as good now, in a very different environment.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman
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ing theories which have little to none, yet a subgroup of people continue t o believe them, e.g. vaccines causing ASD, non-existence of manmade climate change, a flat earth, evolution deniers, etc.

ch. But I'd get ridiculed, and rightly so, because despite essentially all of us never setting foot on the moon and seeing it ourselves, there's mount ains of evidence against it.

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e in a flat earth are more likely to be inventors, that's ridiculous.

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again; those people are not necessarily any more creative than anyone else. Sure, they're creative for coming up with explanations as to why the eart h is flat, but their theories are full of holes. I'd say if anything, thei r understanding of physics and trust in science is sorely lacking.

ng a hoax? I found plenty of posts by you claiming the data doesn't show i t.

That has been the situation for the last couple of million years. Geologica lly speaking, ice ages are pretty rare. John's comments about the accuracy of "adjusted data" seem to be equally well-informed.

Why would John think that? We have had an alternation of ice ages and inter

-glacials roughly every 100,000 years for the last few million years - it's bit more complicated than that, but not enough to matter - and the species now populating the planet seem to have survived quite a few of these cycle s, so a new ice age wouldn't "kill off most of the critters on Earth".

The proposition that "a couple of degrees warming will probably be net bene ficial to life" hasn't been tested quite as recently - not for some 20 mill ion years, and it isn't clear that the adaptions for a warmer climate are q uite as fine-tuned as the adaptions to a colder one.

It's being experimentally tested right now, and despite John's ignorant sce pticism, the models look pretty good.

John thinks he designs electronics, but then again he thinks he thinks abou t climate science, as opposed to reiterating the nonsense he gets fed by de nialist web-sites.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Really?

I was under the impression that they thought about what they were doing and designed things with pencil and paper or these days a circuit capture simulator before they actually built anything beyond trivial.

And most of them don't work or emit the magic smoke instantly.

I recall one of the more amusing tricky physics practical questions. Design a 0.1Hz 2kV PSU to supply a sine wave at zero current.

The solution they came up with was highly amusing if a little dangerous.

Fans of Brian Pippard may already know the answer so please stay quiet if you do and lets see if anyone reinvents it...

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

No, religion is far from universal. The concepts, and what you have in a religion, has varies wildly. The level of believe and the relevance of religion has been equally varied.

In particular, while "faith" has often been important to many people, for many others - especially the folk in charge - religion has just been a token effort for show and conformance to society. Can you show a single ruler of a nominally Christian country who has taken "turn the other cheek" to heart? You'd have a big challenge showing any evidence of it amongst church leaders, never mind secular leaders.

Religion is all about accepting god-given (or priest-given) "truths" without question. Intelligence is all about questioning.

There /is/ a middle ground, for people thinking hard about what they choose to belief, how they can fit together a consistent world picture, and looking for answers where they can get them. So you certainly get intelligent people, and even scientifically minded people, who also have religious beliefs. But they usually have a different kind of faith - a searching, questioning faith, rather than a blind belief faith.

"Very likely" ? You have absolutely no basis for making a value judgement like that. Such a mechanism could be seen as consistent with the evidence around us - but that applies equally to the Church of Last Thursdayism.

Even if there were no scientific explanations or evidence for the way life here started and evolved (and there are some good theories and some evidence, but nothing scientifically solid for abiogenesis - not yet, anyway), that cannot be used to justify a claim of likelihoods. Lack of evidence is /not/ evidence of lack.

There's a kind of notion that everyone's opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who's been a professor of dentistry for 40 years doesn't have a debate with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door!

Current scientific thought - by people who are qualified to give rational and reasoned opinions - is that it is certainly a possibility that some of the key parts for early life arrived from space. Whether that be amino acids and other organics from comets, or complete proto-bacteria that started out on Mars, or something more exotic, is unknown. But the idea of DNA, or life, being "designed" or "engineered" has no rational backing whatsoever. It is simply a wild idea made by people who have no idea what really happened, in a time when they could have no idea that it would ever be possible to understand what really happened.

Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains dribble out.

Reply to
David Brown

In some areas, making good testable predictions for a theory can be very difficult. In the case of abiogenesis, it is impractical to try to replicate the /whole/ process in an experiment. Scientists have been able to replicate a number of partial processes, such as spontaneous arrangement of many of the key molecules and chemical processes involved given precursor environments. They have also found evidence of the required precursors, such as organic molecules in space, early fossil records, etc. There is lots left, and the best we can expect is explanations of possible paths to life rather than proof of the paths that actually occurred on Earth. But the field is far better defined and justified than "just a hypothesis". Non-scientific ideas, like "god made us" or "pan-galactic beings designed the earth as a giant computer" have /no/ evidence, no theories, no observations, no tests, no predictions.

(The principles of evolution are well tested, and not contested - kids manage it in high school biology classes with fruit flies, and anyone who has had contact with multi-resistant bacteria knows evolution is alive and kicking.)

Yes, I agree that pure observation has its limits, and can easily be wrong. That is why it is not enough to be classified as a scientific theory, and why scientists work so hard to move from a hypothesis based on observation to fuller theories. Fitting the model in with other scientific information is one key aspect, as is figuring out rational, consistent, and quantitative models.

Now there I agree with you :-)

Reply to
David Brown

or you can consider the various possibilities.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

snip

Working things out is a big part of design. Design is full of tradeoffs, on e needs to understand them, and which ones are how important, and what othe r designs have missed. It's all reasoning plus other stuff. If you doubt it , ask a newbie to make design choices, they srew up on basic reasoning.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

Sure but we finally figured out that the Earth goes around the Sun.

I don't really know the theory, but talking to those in the know, matching the fluctuations in the CMB to models of the early universe are in agreement with other observations. (Amount of matter, dark matter etc.)

Oh I like that too! Immediate feedback if my 'little' understanding of something is correct.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Oh I'm a Pippard fan, but don't know the answer. Does it do +/- 2kV? or 0 to 2 kV? I assume using my func. generator and boosting that up to 2 kV is not the answer.

I've got a bunch of silly ideas... Van de Graff generators swinging back and forth on a long string... induced charges. ... some beta decay source on a wheel (RC bleeding off charge)

... stacks of photo diodes and some oscillating light source.

None seem elegant enough for Pippard.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Well, it took long enough. And until Einstein, we got it almost right.

G has been measured experimentally.

Observation coupled with good, predictive math models gives one a lot of confidence. Most physical theories started with observation, then preceded to math models and/or experiment.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Where do you get that list of possibilities? Look them up in a book?

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

It's more fun to ask an expert if they have any new ideas.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

The heliocentric model was proposed over two thousand years ago, but it was not until Copernicus that the observations made it clear that the earth goes round the sun. The Catholic Church was very much against the idea.

Note that they are not "theories" when they start - they are hypothesis at best, or perhaps just ideas. You don't get the rank of "scientific theory" until you have reached a certain stage of models, evidence, testing, and predictions.

I recently read that new models and simulations show that "dark energy" is not needed to explain the expansion of the universe. Science progresses!

Reply to
David Brown

Hey, there's no guarantee that Einstein was the last word on gravity. There are these MOND theories to explain dark matter,

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I'd bet on some particle instead, but who knows.

Not all that well, and only over sorta limited ranges in distance and mass. Oh my idea to improve the Cavendish balance. let the test mass move through a hole in the attracting spherical mass. Next replace the sphere with a sheet of mass. (a wall of lead bricks.. gold brick if you're made of money. :^)

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

That all happens subconsciously inside an inventor's brain, often when he's asleep or taking a shower or something. It's like (or more than like) a quantum qbit computer: a superposition of all possible solutions exists in an un-collapsed state; a filter operation, with performance specs, nudges the superposition into a concrete, collapsed state, namely an actual circuit. Monkeys on typewriters can't do quantum superposition; one person can.

Sometimes, rarely, a group of people can do that together; that's amazing.

"collapsing the wave function" turns up some spooky stuff.

"We chose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery."

- Richard Feynman

Sort of like that. It's an attitude.

You could swing a pendulum between two charged plates.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Religion, hunger, sex drive, racism, are all potential energy sources among people, things that clever or charismatic people can exploit. In nature, few sources of energy hang around un-exploited.

Throughout human history, people have had both. They actually go together. Lately, we seem to be getting less spiritual and dumber.

Sure I do. If life pops up spontaneously, some self-organizing chemistry plus evolution, it surely happened on some other planet somewhere when our solar system was still dust. Some of those life forms would choose to spread life. If life doesn't pop up spontaneously, QED.

Such a mechanism could be seen as consistent with

You define yourself by the things that you immediately reject. I make a living by taking business away from people like that.

Don't reject ideas, even obviously impossible ideas, without playing around with them for a while. You never know what might happen.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

It seems obvious to me now. All you need is a campfire and a few guys walking around with round rocks to demonstrate stuff like the observed paths of planets and eclipses.

What's interesting is how often engineering precedes, and causes, science. Then science makes the engineering better. Like the Telegraphers' Equations.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Certainly not. But at least we have a model of orbital mechanics that is as good as we can measure now.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

But when you get it wrong and write it in "the book" incorrectly, some people will still dismiss any better insights thousands of years later. Because it is not what was written in "the book".

Reply to
Rob

Which group are you in? Working or not working?

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  
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John Larkin

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