"John Doty" <jpd at w-d.org> wrote in message news:<xWSdnWa5u85nV4mjXTWcqQ at speakeasy.net>...
> In article <3e1127ba$0$79559$8eec23a at newsreader.tycho.net>,
>rstevew at deeptht.armory.com wrote:
>> > People who even USE the word "scientism" are selling shit for tootsie
> > rolls. It's a weasel-word, the jargon of cranks. People believing in
> > Science are far better off than the morons who believe that "Science
> > could be wrong" and haven't the brains to grasp that their whole notion
> > of Science is fucked and that they are believing cretins like you who
> > feed them crap.
>> So polite :-)
>> Steve, I'm a professional scientist. Out at the cutting edge, when you're
> really using the scientific method, science doesn't look infallible at
> all. The practice of science is largely confusion and error. The
> difference between a crank and a scientist is just this: a good scientist,
> when presented with strong evidence against one of his hypotheses, will
> modify or abandon it. The crank clings to error.
>> We don't teach this process to our young students: instead "Science" is
> presented as a body of settled, proven fact. Teaching materials are, in
> fact, filled with errors and misrepresentations. For example, a few years
> ago I bought a spectroscopy chart from an educational supply house,
> showing the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves to cosmic rays.
> Cosmic rays are not electromagnetic radiation: they were shown to be
> charged particles back in the 1930's. I have read that this error
> persisted in American textbooks because Millikan was a proponent of the
> hypothesis that cosmic rays were electromagnetic radiation, and his
> prestige in American physics gave him an undue influence. Millikan himself
> modified, and later quietly abandoned the hypothesis, but it remained as
> "truth" in "science" teaching materials.
>> The science in engineering texts isn't quite so bad, since damaging
> misconceptions tend to get weeded out. I could, however, wish that more
> EE's understood that Ohm's law is just a fairly common material property,
> not a basic law of physics, while Kirchoff's laws are largely a pledge by
> their user to carefully account for all displacement current and
> induction.
>> By presenting "Science" as a body of "Truth" to be accepted on the
> authority of the educator, we fail to equip students with the tools to
> distinguish reality from fiction. Indeed we give the enemies of real
> science a free ride: if science is based on authority, to get different
> science ("Creation Science" etc.) all you need is different authority.
Thank you for making the point that Science has a Belief System that
can be Blinded as Religion.
Science was invented to test what we do not know. It is a Method of
Testing Processes and some of what is taught as Science is outdated,
and limited.
I was telling a retired Lockheed Programmer that I did not know when I
would be done with a certain project that I have worked on for years,
his response, "You will never be done."
I realized that he was right, that, in his over seventy years of life,
he knew that there is no real end result but an ongoing result after
result after result.
So, I think that the another problem in our society, we are chasing
rainbows and cannot grasp the reality in front of us. A lot of that is
due to not being able to discern what is real and what is what one
thought was real. We do not know when to Test and When to Stop Testing
Reality.
It makes the average citizen Uncertain about the Right things and
Certain about Wrong things. I mean that one can hear others spouting
off a Fact that is really a Rumor or a Rumor that is really a Fact.
At a presentation last year, a physicist in the audience claimed that
a human body could be healed by knowing the correct Electromagnetic
Frequency and that it is a matter of time that Science will know what
frequencies the body needs to stimulate the healing process.
I think that is limited since the EM Spectrum does not cover the
Alpha-Omega of Laws of what creates a human body. I know that a CDRW
disk has a chemical that makes it responsive the laser in my CDRW
writer, but human bodies are made of more than chemicals on a CD Disk.
A CD does not propell itself back and forth from the Computer as I do.
And, it does not reproduce itself as I can. Nor can it maintain itself
like my body does daily. Not being a Scientist, it just seems to me,
only intuitively, that human bodies cannot merely be a product of a
chemical reaction with the EM Spectrum.
Yes, I do know that the Bleeding Edge of Cancer Research involved
viewing the Cancer Cells via Ultra-violet Rays. But even if one can
Test the Cells using UV Light, it does not mean that we know what is
going on in the Microcosm. UV Light is a Tool to Poke around in Dark
Room we cannot see.
My point is that Science is System of Creating Tools that came from an
evolution from Ancient Cultures. Science emerged from history. It did
not appear on the scene from Aliens. Well, maybe it did? ( - joke for
those who not get it.)
Science and Religion need to see that there is no need to fight with
each other. Move on; evolve.
geakazoid
