OT: Liquid water is composed of 150-unit branching polymers

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tests, but rarely if ever show up in science.

Some science is susceptible to experiment, and experiments are a great way of collecting the evidence you think you need. Sometimes intellectual error can manifest itself in the experiments that don't get run.

"The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

Huxley was a comparative anatomist, which is to say an observational rather than an experimental scientist, so his idea of a fact would be one that so mebody had dug up, or got revealed when he chopped up an unfamiliar animal.

No experiment involved.

The Natural History Museum in New York has a cute display which contrasts w hat Huxley thought about the evolution of the horse - based on the evidence available back then, which they've got on display - with the current point of view based on the evidence which has been dug up since then (of which t hey display a representative sample mixed in with what Huxley knew about).

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John Larkin has a blind spot when it comes to observational sciences. Geolo gy is necessarily observational, and the nearest I can think of to a "wild swing" in geology was the slow acceptance of continental drift.

Wegner articulated the idea in 1912, but it took a lot of observations - ma ny of them impossible when Wegner first published - to accumulate enough ev idence to make the case persuasive. The magnetic stripes that run parallel to the oceanic ridges seem to have been the critical evidence, and those ob servations seem to date from about 1947, but it still took about twenty mor e years before the idea was accepted orthodoxy.

John Larkin is to be congratulated for appreciating that his ideas are fatu ously superficial in at least one area. One could hope that he'd progress t o learning enough to realise that his ideas are fatuously superficial in m any more areas, but I'm not optimistic.

Complaint?

...slaying of a beautlful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Read between the lines: that's a boast.

Yes.

That /can/ happen, yes. Usually, however, it is not the scientists that swing - it is politicians, media, company marketing departments, religious fanatics, people who are looking for power, money or popularity rather than science, facts and truth. So it is easy to get the impression that there is "scientific debate" or "disagreement amongst the experts" in fields such as evolution or climate change, when there is overwhelming agreement (like 95%+ in agreement, amongst scientists in the right fields) on the basics. Details, of course, will be subject to debate, swings, new evidence, and so on.

Those are not "hard" science, except in the sense that they are rather difficult to understand. They are not "hard science", precisely because they are no "experimental science" - no one has yet imagined any practical and helpful experiments in these fields, never mind tried to carry them out. Maybe they will get there in the end, but for now these are purely theoretical sciences. Really, "string theory" is a misnomer

- it should be called "string hypothesis".

In Sabine H's book, she talks about theoretical physicists that insist that their theories are so beautiful that they should not be tested by experiment.

Agreement among experts is no substitute for experimental verification.

Vilifying dissenters is another mechanism for defending mass delusion.

A physicist can question the Standard Model or Newton's laws of gravitation, and be taken seriously. In fields like evolution and climate, experiment is impossible and dissent is attacked.

There is enthusiasm for a next-generation collider, much bigger than CERN, to test some past-standard-model theories. $20 billion or so.

CERN failed to find a lot of proposed particles; a bigger collider may fail to find even more.

Hypothesis sciences?

Of course. But agreement amongst experts on the results of observations, experiments and the overall theories /is/ a reasonable basis for accepting something as "true". (As noted, there are often details that are debated, and often what experts agree on is about how much they don't know.)

When 95% of experts say one thing, and 5% say say something else, then usually those 5% are wrong. When those 5% have clear motives for their opinions (money, politics, religion, etc.), then it is almost a sure bet that they are wrong. When most of them don't even have scientific credentials in the field in question, you can risk your life savings on them being wrong.

Basically, you do not get "mass delusion" amongst large groups of independent scientists.

That does not mean that outlying dissenters are never wrong - merely that it is very rarely the case. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - that applies particularly when the claim is "I'm right, everyone else is wrong".

Attacking a dissenter is not good science or polite behaviour. But it is entirely reasonable to ask them to "put up, or shut up". No one has put up any counter-evidence to evolution, nor any reasonable hint of a theory, nor any idea about possible experiments. The same goes for climate change and human influence in it. (The /level/ of the human influence is questionable, the types of effects are a matter of more research. The fact that the climate is changing and that humans are significantly to blame is not.)

And there are experiments in both these fields, along with a great deal of observation.

There is a huge amount of knowledge gained from CERN, both scientific and technical - and /some/ particles were found. There is no doubt that we could learn more from an even bigger device. Could we learn enough to make it worth the cost? Or would the money be better spent on other types of scientific research? That is the big question.

Lol! I will give this comment all the response it deserves...

Yes, failure to verify an idea is a necessary part of science, yes? I had the impression that was how you do a lot of your design work. Draft a basi c idea, run a simulation to find a lot of component values that don't work well until you find the few that do. Or breadboard a circuit so you can ex plore and prove an idea will or won't work. Does everything you design (wh ich is 100% explained by existing theory unlike particle physics) work perf ectly?

Isn't that a part of science?

I can see JL thinks science should proceed like electronic design. A theor y is developed, proven, shipped and bragged about in SED.

Rick C.

It is often miss quoted by people attacking science but it was originally coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in an address to the British Association in defence of science. His point was that it matters not one jot how pretty the theory is if it doesn't explain the observations.

That is a nonsense. The whole purpose of experimental physics is to keep the wider flights of fancy of theoreticians under control. I have known theoreticians lament that their pet theory was refuted by a convincing experiment but never to complain about the experiment being done!

More often than not they look for a testable prediction of their theory that would allow it to be distinguished from the status quo.

Nature ultimately trumps all - it doesn't matter how beautiful a new theory is if it doesn't explain the universe that we live in.

Though sometimes people play around with computer models of universes that don't exist. When I was an undergraduate ideal 2D conductive materials were popular for theoretical games but we never dreamt that one day someone with nothing more than sellotape would make real ones.

Likewise for buckeyballs which mystified astronomers dust spectra.

It depends what you mean by experimental verification. Astrophysicists are stuck on Earth and only able to observe things at a distance that send out electromagnetic waves, particles or most recently gravitational waves. We are well aware that we cannot test theories by going out and tweaking a galaxy to see what happens or restarting the universe from the Big Bang and so are stuck with doing computer simulations.

Observational astronomy is limited to making ever more powerful telescopes and ingenious detectors to see what is out there. A new big instrument typically throws up a few surprises like the Canadian phased array which spotted fast radio bursts. This is actually a paper about one seen by the Australian 1km array but it has the same properties.

Some dissenters deserve to be vilified.

The ones ranting on about MMR vaccine and autism have made measles a new serious disease in the UK and elsewhere. People have forgotten just how nasty measles was in the old days and we have now broken herd immunity.

A physicist who denied conservation laws would get very short shrift unless they had a very convincing argument.

Evolution is still happening all around us. You only have to look at the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. You can drive it in short lived species like fruit flies to test the theories. There is even a teaching computer model for it to avoid all the tedious lab work.

There may be ways to distinguish between them. They have far too many free parameters for my taste but some people I know do take them seriously. One of my peer group is a world leading string theorist.

The present one found the Higg's boson which was enough to get Higg's a Nobel Prize.

All theories start out life as a working hypothesis. They only really become theories as they begin to gain acceptance in the community.

In the case of Big Bang that virtually meant waiting until all of the Steady State people had finally popped their clogs. Fred Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang" theory as a derogatory term and it stuck. His supporters fought a rearguard action against Big Bang.

Digikey will sell you graphite sheets that have phenominal thermal conductivity in the plane of the sheet. Unfortunately, the heat usually flows in the third axis.

They will float above a magnet.

Oh, yeah, like 'the recent election failed to put good people into office', that's just a linguistic bit of trickery, elections make the will of the people known, which is NOT failure. Experimentation makes knowledge. The experiment is a success if it discovers a feature, AND a success if it discovers a void.

The Grand Canyon is quite a sight, you should go see it sometime. It's a void.

A lot of science could be done for the cost of the ISS or the next collider, both of which are likely to discover nothing.

What's more likely to advance science, one $20 billion experiment or

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Nobody (except perhaps John Larkin) thinks that it might be.

isn't attacked. His hypotheses have been tested against reality and falsifi ed, but that's science, not attack.

John Larkin does have a blind spot about observational science. You can't d o experiments, but you can go out an collect relevant data, which does much the same job. You don't actually manipulate the environment before you col lect the data, so it isn't an experiment, but the business of working out w here to, and how to collect the data fulfils the same function.

As in the Michelson-Morley ether drift experiment

the negative results are extremely informative. John Larkin hasn't been inf ormed - he doesn't realise that there was anything to be informed about.

Hypotheses are a central part of science. If you haven't got a hypothesis t o test, you aren't in the science business.

John Larkin is actually a creationist - he believes that some God invented the world to provide us with intellectual puzzles to tease out. Reality is less constrained.

In John Larkin's opinion - which is free, but worthless.

Let's do both and find out. Which is what actually happens ...

What happened to all the industrial research labs? Bell, GE, IBM, etc. I guess we have billionaire funding. (that's always been around.)

George H.

They are mostly gone.

They are, but isn't your conclusion a step too far? Before you can have a hypothesis, you have to observe. Surely before the "how" comes the "why". "Why" is the observation; "how" the hypothesis. Both are essential parts of science. Where would Newton have been without the apple?

But at the extremes it all becomes blurred. I don't think that anyone put it better than Asimov - a scientist with an unusual way of looking at things.

Applying a little bit of torque and a lot of pressure they have been able to make bilayer graphenes superconductive. Recent report:

I remember seeing a demo of an early space shuttle tile where it was still red hot at the edges but cool enough to touch in the middle of the main surfaces only a short time after coming out of a furnace.