Who is your favorite Physicist?

Good point.

Moi? Toujours!

The good think with considering history a science is that you can then hold historians accountable to facts and distinguish history from literature. If history was not a science, historians could freely invent their narratives, based on what they fancy telling.

Historians make value judgments. Any historian today arguing that slavery is an acceptable cultural practice will be run out of town. Historians write as if slavery was a horrible evil.

This is a cultural truth, but in a science there is no room for these types of value judgments.

Science is not free of ideology or value judgments. For instance, biologists and medical doctors were until WW2 routinely backing up a racist world view. Now they don't, because they're a bit wiser after WW2. There are many other examples. Eg Newton justified his alchemic research by stating that metals have a sort of soul, and argued in his Principia for a God that would have designed the universe.

"science" may have no room for value judgements but individual scientists are loaded with em.
We must STOP Continental Drift.

Science is free of ideology. Scientists are human beings, they aren't free of ideology. But, we have built up scientific institutions in multiple cultures that get the same results. Bournoulli's principle is true for airplanes whether they are built in Russia or China or Iran.

Science is based on experiment, the ability to test theories objectively and to make repeatable predictions. This ability to make repeatable predictions happens regardless of culture. You keep on sucking me back into an argument that I think is silly.

(Edit: I just noticed that farmerman pre-empted my point ).

Science is a human construct. It is NOT free of ideology at all. That's magic thinking to believe so. It is assuming that something created by men could magically get rid of human foibles...

I don't know what you mean by "human construct". That is an ill-defined phrase.

Science has

- Doubled the human life expectancy.
- Offered cures for diseases.
- Given humans the power to fly from one continent to another in hours.
- Put robots on mars.
- And... allowed you and I to communicate over a distance of thousands of miles (assuming you are in Europe) in a matter of milliseconds.

Now whether you think that science is responsible for things like the movement of the tectonic plates, or that objects with mass attract each other is a matter of semantics... if we argue this, it will just get into a still argument about the definition of the word "science".

But the fact is that objects with mass do attract each other. I can point you to the evidence. I can give you experiments that you can do that refute other explanations. And, this will be true in any cultural context.

Is science responsible for evolution?

You misunderstood me. I am all for science, it's just that I don't believe it is magical, ideal or pure from human foibles... I believe science is a very human thing. Scientists are not gods or robots. They are humans, and they don't magically get rid of their prejudices or ideologies when they enter a lab... Their research is funded by politicians and businessmen too.

no arguments . Scientists rarely live on the edge of the decision tree where the decisions are actually made. We "recommend" and are often listened to but mostly ignored.

Research is shaped by society's expectations, motivated by the researcher's own queries, doubts and pet ideas, structured through analytical frameworks inherited from school or previous research, etc. etc. People don't leave their prejudices outside the lab. The very questions scientists are working on are heavily infused with politics, economics and ideology. You work for the minning industry don't you? Does pure knowledge interest them more than minerals? And why did Newton search all his life for the philosopher stone? For the sake of pure knowledge, or to make gold out of lead?

The idea that science has no room for prejudice and ideology, that in itself is a form of ideological prejudice. Facts say otherwise.

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Did I ay otherwise? ometimes scientists are their own worst enemies. Einstein was both for and then , against the A bomb. His letters to Roosevelt in support of one were based on a Germany armed with such a weapon and able to deliver it to us. He then preached against the same A bomb in use on Japan .
I think history, viewed coldly logical says that he was wrong in the second statement.

Bishop Robert Grosseteste, 12th century scholar, an early user of scientific thinking.

Oh I'm pretty sure you have a more pragmatic view of science than many, and no i was not implying that you said otherwise.

Einstein famously rejected the Copenhagen consensus out of the idea that "God does not play dice".

You are confusing science with scientists.

At the core of science are a set of rules that govern nature. These rules existed long before human ever evolved, and long before any life on Earth started replicating. These rules are unaffected by human ideas or ideology. Now.. you are right that scientists, as human beings, are subject to prejudice and ideology and hopes and fears. But scientists are not science.

The key part of science is that experiments are objective and reproducible. It doesn't matter who you are or what your ideology, nature works the same way for a modern citizen of the US as it does for someone from China, or from 1000 years ago, or even a prehistoric worm. If a prehistoric worm put an electric charge across a semiconductor junction, she would get the same result you get today.

When two scientists have different opinions on a scientific fact, there is an objective way to determine who is right and who is wrong. You rely on experiment. At this point the personalities, ideologies or prejudices don't matter. It is possible for a person to ignore the scientific result of experiment.. but they do this at a cost. In science there are right answers and wrong answer.

The side with the right answers is the side that builds airplanes, develops computers and sends robots to Mars. You can't do these things if you put your ideology in front of the facts of the experiments.

You are right that human beings, including scientists are subject to prejudice. So let's talk about why science has accomplished so much. We are flying around in the bellies of giant birds, and transmitting our ideas around the world almost instantaneously and driving around in carriages that move themselves. These aren't things that were created by ideologies. They were created by understanding and harnessing the rules of nature.

Science now has an advantage. We have set up institutions that allow the scientific community to advance rapidly. Experiments are done on a world stage. Results are shared and criticized and analyzed by people in many different settings. And the results are pretty spectacular.

You may suggest that this isn't a perfect system... and I would agree. But it is a pretty damn good system, and the results are pretty amazing.

As you type your response, consider the irony. You are typing on plastic keys (a material that didn't exist 150 years ago) on a device that relies on Quantum Mechanics (which wasn't understood 100 years ago). And, you are transmitting your ideas at the speed of light to us all, something that 100 years ago would have been considered magic.

This is what science can do.

If greatness in human thought potential is evenly spread through the population (which it probably is), then the best minds humanity has ever produced or ever will produce will probably never be recognized. Superior intellects probably exist all around us every day but simply lack the combination of skills and/or education to stand out.

You're confusing me with a creationist or something. I'm a scientific thoroughbred, trained in mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. I don't need a lecture on the power of science.

I also happen to have invested much thought in the philosophy of science. And I can assure you that science is NOT a set of objective and eternal rules.

Science is just the result of a very human activity called research that uses a combination of rationalism and empiricism, a combination theorized by philosophers mainly during the 17th century and called "the scientific approach".

So science is a product of philosophy, and a very human thing.

You have no evidence that there exist objective and eternal laws of nature, waiting for us to discover them. That idea in itself is philosophical. It's not a proven fact.

Ah okay, sorry for misunderstanding. "Grosse teste" is old French for "grosse tête" = "big head". Slang for an intellectually pretentious person, such as myself... :-)

What is your definition of the word "objective". The power of science comes from the fact that experiments can be repeated. Experimental results are objective. Sure, our understanding of science progresses and our understanding is far from complete. But when it comes to whether an airplane will fly, or won't fly.. it is objective.

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