How does the Earth move in space in 3 seperate trajectories?

1. There are right answers in science. There is settled science that is accepted by the scientific community that is taught in every reputable science department in the world. That isn't to say that science knows everything... there are plenty of open questions. But when you talk about the "science herd" it is because scientists all know something.

When scientists talk about classical mechanics or basic problems in general relativity they all come up with the same answer because they all understand the right answer.

2. Scientists know more about science than non-scientists (including philosophers). That is because scientists spend 10 or 12 years studying science. Scientists learn the math, do problem sets, perform labs, read and write papers, get training and feedback from professors and peers.

If you want to be a scientist you have to do the work. It isn't just about making things up.

This thread is funny because it is a rather heated discussion... allegedly about science... between people who obviously haven't studied science in any serious way. The problem with this is it is using (incorrectly) scientific terms which may seem like science to casual readers.

There is very little in the thread so far that has any valid scientific content. It is basically philosophy... people making up what science should be without any knowledge of what science actually is.

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@maxdancona,

What was your research topic ?

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Your attempt to divorce 'actual science' from 'social considerations' is at best utopian, at at worst meaningless, with respect to the view of science as 'a paradigmatic progression' (Thomas Khun 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'), in which the members of the social consensus of the prevailing paradigm tend to have authority over what constitutes 'legitimate subject matter'. You should consider that point with reference to Grazing Dogs attempt to bring in the work of Rupert Sheldrake (as a fellow non-conformist but not a flat earthist) whose views put him out on a limb. The fact that Sheldrake is now promoting religious views of 'cosmic consciousness' has even further detracted from his credibility, lost after his original successes in biological science.

The effect of becoming aware of Khun's paradigm-structures is that you can question it and overcome the structure, like a mouse in a maze who becomes aware of the maze and the smell of cheese as part of the control system.

What I explained is very simple, but I will give a more concrete example to further simplify it:

Let's say you 'believe' in climate change because of consensus within the scientific community, which you respect and honor as veritable proof that the climate is changing.

Fine, but then you reflect on your own reason for accepting community-consensus as proof and you know enough about true science to realize that believing in something because of community-consensus is no different from medieval astronomers believing the Earth was the center of the universe because that was the consensus in their scholarly communities.

Now you are in the uncomfortable, yet truly unbiased, position of having to assess claims independently of what others think, no matter how well-regarded or highly-acclaimed those others are within a scientific/academic community of scholars and researchers.

In other words, you begin the hard task of formulating scientific judgment based on actual critical review of information rather than acceptance/conformity of/to community consensus and/or established doctrine.

That doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to reject climate change or round-Earth theory or any other established scientific knowledge. It just means you're going to think about it in a scientific way instead of in a community-conformist way.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

That isn't to say that science knows everything... there are plenty of open questions. But when you talk about the "science herd" it is because scientists all know something.

The point is that if you are approaching knowledge in a truly scientific way, you aren't going to be satisfied with believing anything because of what anyone else says, whether they are part of a 'scientific herd' or not.

The spirit of science seeks to know truth independently of social-consensus/conformity. Even if everyone knows that the Earth is round, a true scientist wants to know why; wants to review and maybe even replicate observations and experiments.

A truly scientific mind questions received knowledge until it is satisfied. It doesn't allow itself to be pacified or subjugated by other scientists goading it into accepting what is established and/or widely accepted by other scientists. There's nothing scientific about blindly accepting what others agree with because they are highly regarded as scientists.

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@livinglava,

You really think a "scientific philosopher can develop 10,000 years of human achievement in a single lifetime of daydreaming.

Real scientists go to university. They take courses, starting with calculus and classical physics. They do problem sets, they write papers, they write labs. They get critiqued by professors and peers. You learn the right answers. This doesn't mean you accept them blindly... as you develop the mathematical skills, you can check the work yourself.

There are no shortcuts. You can't do this without taking time to learn the mathematical skills (meaning linear algebra, vector calculus and differential equations at a minimum). Every person who is working in science or engineering in any useful capacity does this.

Science has developed over thousands of years. Humanity needed to understand Galilean Relativity before they could get to classical Newtonian Mechanics. They needed to understand Newtonian Mechanics before they could understand wave motion, or the photoelectric affect, or the electromagnetic spectrum or General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. Serious students of science go through the same process much faster because they can learn the work of others that has been proven to be correct.

You want to just make stuff up on your own and decide what to believe and what you don't want to believe.

You have the right to do this. But this desire to make stuff up for yourself isn't science.

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@maxdancona,

My research area, speech perception, included spectral analysis of speech waveforms in which there is a payoff between 'frequency' and 'amplitude' information (similar to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for position and momentum). So not only did I need to be familiar with Fourier analysis, but also the nuances of the concept of 'information' beyond standard 'information theory' as developed in communication systems. Those 'nuances' involved both the mathematical and psychological approaches to linguistics which inevitably involved philosophical views of the nature of 'communication'.

My point is that my research gave me a far better understanding of 'science' than the mere application of standard methods to solve specifiable problems. So that is why I asked you about your 'research topic' because if you merely sweated over routine course work or standard methods applied to tangible problem solving you would be in no more of a position to claim 'expertise' about the 'nature of science' than say a skilled golfer would be able to pronounce on 'game theory'.

1 Reply

@fresco,

That's interesting Fresco. My career (for the past 2 decades) has been in speech recognition.

I worked in speech to text for a while where the technology produced a written transcript of what someone said. My current job is to deduce an what we call an "intent". We want to be able to classify what the speaker is intending to do to respond appropriately. You will notice that I am very careful to avoid psychological terms like "understand" or "deduce"... the Artificial Intelligence doesn't understand anything. Speech recognition systems in commercial use now use statistical models, it is completely detached from the way humans understand language. The world I live in is mathematical, we do experiments to calculate the efficiency of algorithms, in my job it is easy to forget that there are humans at all, most of my day to day work is mathematics.

That isn't to say that the fields of psychology and linguistics don't inform the work (we hire linguists who are invaluable to the work). But the place where these fields are important is the interface between the hard mathematics of a digital machine and the strange, complex non-scientific world of the human psyche.

The point, and where I think you go wrong, is confusing science with other fields. Science isn't everything. There are questions that science can not answer and in those cases science is inappropriate, for example I squawk when science is used a basis for moral truth.

But for the questions that are best answered by science, science provides an correct answer. In these cases all that matters is the science.

Imagine calculating the ballistic trajectory of a fired projectile. The nature of the projectile is irrelevant. The trajectory of a nuclear bomb will be the same as the trajectory of a packet of food aid... the meaning of the projectile doesn't matter to the science it acts according to the mathematics of the forces acting on it no matter how the humans around it understand its meaning.

Of course you want people to understand and to consider very carefully the meaning of a nuclear bomb, or a communications satellite, or a cell phone. But these considerations have nothing to do with science.

The mistake you are making is confusing science with other fields.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

You really think a "scientific philosopher can develop 10,000 years of human achievement in a single lifetime of daydreaming.

Real scientists go to university. They take courses, starting with calculus and classical physics. They do problem sets, they write papers, they write labs. They get critiqued by professors and peers. You learn the right answers. This doesn't mean you accept them blindly... as you develop the mathematical skills, you can check the work yourself.

Well, something happens to the mind in the course of following a dense sequence of academic task-assignments. The critical thinking faculty of the mind sort of surrenders for the sake of just getting through one's work as efficiently as possible. This is helpful for getting work done, but it impedes the true basis of science, which is critical reception of received/established knowledge in order to satisfy a deeper thirst for truth.

Quote:

There are no shortcuts. You can't do this without taking time to learn the mathematical skills (meaning linear algebra, vector calculus and differential equations at a minimum). Every person who is working in science or engineering in any useful capacity does this.

Science has developed over thousands of years. Humanity needed to understand Galilean Relativity before they could get to classical Newtonian Mechanics. They needed to understand Newtonian Mechanics before they could understand wave motion, or the photoelectric affect, or the electromagnetic spectrum or General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. Serious students of science go through the same process much faster because they can learn the work of others that has been proven to be correct.

You want to just make stuff up on your own and decide what to believe and what you don't want to believe.

You have the right to do this. But this desire to make stuff up for yourself isn't science.

You're right. It is important to thoroughly study something before questioning it. However, if you just study it without questioning it, you don't really get the experience of truth-seeking/discovery.

When Newton developed his laws of motion, for example, he did so in the shadow of Aristotelian notions that continuous motion could only be maintained by adding energy against the decelerating force of friction. You have to understand why that is empirically valid to understand why the discovery of frictionless momentum of inertial motion is such a striking discovery.

If all you do is learn that inertia is a thing and then learn to calculate F=MA, you never really develop a critical understanding of the truths behind the math. Yes, you get a sense of power in being able to correctly apply math to solve equations and process data; but in terms of experiencing the significance of shifting theoretical understanding, paradigms, etc. that stuff doesn't pack the same epistemological punch if you just automatically surrender to established knowledge in order to gain the status that comes with doing all your homework and scoring well on tests and papers.

Ironically, it is Hollywood that actually captures the sense of awe that comes with grasping the magnitude of theory and paradigm shifts. Movies like Jurassic Park and other sci-fi use music and acting to model how true scientific discovery feels and then science students get motivated to go into scientific education and work, where they then discover that the Hollywood portrayal is not really the reality.

In truth, however, what Hollywood portrays is the real science and all the other work is just dogmatic learning that provides the nuts and bolts to flesh out scientific research in ways that can be processed and communicated.

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@maxdancona,

Interesting for me too. I am pretty skeptical about your likely success with 'intent' having become familiar with the 'embodied cognition' at Berkeley. But good luck and keep me posted.

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@fresco,

Your skepticism is misplaced.

If you have ever said "OK Google play we are the champions" and then heard Queen coming from a phone speaker then you have used a similar technology. The software on your phone doesn't make any attempt at anything you would call "cognition". It is using a statistical model to connect a stream of audio data to a an action. We use the term "intent" as a technical term for the output of a classification algorithm. It has no direct connection with the internal mental state of the user.

The software I work on is more specialized; it solves a more well defined problem and the fact that our users are likely to say things within a narrow range of topics we can get better accuracy than Google or Siri. The product I work on has about a 95% accuracy rate (as measured by user expectations) and is a solid commercial success (and has been for over a decade).

This is a successful technology. The process has everything to do with mathematics and nothing to do with psychology or even remotely like human cognition.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

Ah....'narrow range' explains where you are at. And do you think anybody is likely to entrust a narrow range context like 'air traffic control' to your system ?

1 Reply

@fresco,

The point that I am making is that there are some problems that are very well suited to mathematical or scientific analysis only. In these problems you don't want to consider human factors because they don't apply. If you want to calculate the lift of an airfoil, you shouldn't consider the purpose of the aircraft you are designing, the Physics matters not any human meaning.

There are scientific questions. They should answered by science, bring in other consideration just gets in the way; what matters is the mathematical analysis. There are questions that science can not answer that should be answered by religion, or philosophy.

The scientists say, we have looked at it very carefully and seen the evidence. We have concluded that the science says that human beings developed through a process of evolution from earlier species. Scientists analyze the process, see the historical evidence, learn how to analyze DNA....

Philosophers say... "we can't accept the idea that human life developed through a random process". And that is the reason that so many people reject much of science.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

Your general characterization of philosophers rejecting random evolution is mythical. You presumably mean creationists, whom most philosophers dismiss as fantacists. On the other hand philosophers do point out that 'evidence' and 'axioms' are contextually selected by scientists engaged in mutual problem solving and that scientific 'success' could turn out to be short lived. It is with those points in mind, together with the complexity of science which fuels lay rejection of scientists.

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How does the Earth move in space in 3 seperate trajectories?

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