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OT: The F*cking Science Thread

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/02/20/the-worst-kind-of-science-hype/

Did you hear the news? A game-changing story about the Universe has just come out! Something is vastly, spectacularly different from the way we thought, and it will revolutionize the way we think about the most basic, fundamental properties of our very existence.

Blah, blah, blah. Or, you know, not.

Extraordinary claims like this come out all the time: cosmological inflation is unnecessary, neutrinos can travel faster-than-light, our experiment has detected dark matter, the fundamental constants aren’t really constant, and so on. If you keep your ear to the ground (or listen to the more speculative sources), you’re bound to hear at least one or two of these a month.

And they’re also almost always wrong. (And I hesitated there to put almost in that sentence.) Here’s why.
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Yeah, read the link I posted. It explains why every story we come across that promises to turn all of science on it's ear turns out to be incorrect.
 
MindzEye said:
I forgot a backslash...that's all you've got man? I mean, grammar nazi is some gay shit, but format nazi is something entirely worse.
Yeah


But hey, if you want to believe that all of cosmology is dead wrong, have at it. There has been a lot of good observation that has gone into backing up the theory to this point. It's incomplete, so there's more work to do, but the odds of throwing out pretty rigorously tested cosmological phenomena like black holes and some sort of big bang/expansionary event as the starting point for the physical universe at this point is pretty slim.
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I'm not saying that cosmology is wrong or that this scientist whose article I did not even read is right, I'm just saying that nobody knows, and nobody does.

But, IF her study is legit, it blows holes through what we think we know.

I am aware of how the catholic church buried science and imprisoned or executed those that practised such witchcraft. Maybe the Greeks had things figured out too, but that doesn't mean that anyone else did.

Today's world is still full of religious nuts and ideologies. My con man is better than your con man so ima cut off yo head. Cover up your ankles, ho!
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Remember when they said neutrino's could break through the light speed barrier? That was supposed to crush everything that came before it and it turned out to be a case of experimental design failure. Dudes plugged their optical cable in wrong.
 
'Extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence.' - Carl Sagan.




For clicks & pages views, all that's required today is the extraordinary claims.
 
JohnnyHolmes said:
MindzEye said:
I forgot a backslash...that's all you've got man? I mean, grammar nazi is some gay shit, but format nazi is something entirely worse.
Yeah




I'm not saying that cosmology is wrong or that this scientist whose article I did not even read is right, I'm just saying that nobody knows, and nobody does.

But, IF her study is legit, it blows holes through what we think we know.

I am aware of how the catholic church buried science and imprisoned or executed those that practised such witchcraft. Maybe the Greeks had things figured out too, but that doesn't mean that anyone else did.

Today's world is still full of religious nuts and ideologies. My con man is better than your con man so ima cut off yo head. Cover up your ankles, ho!
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None of that mini rant has anything to do with science though, which is what you're suggesting is wildly inaccurate here. The amount of science that these findings would prove false is massive and far reaching. I don't think you really grasp how much accumulated work that has been rigorously verified would be proven wrong here.

These people aren't just stabbing in the dark man, their work is based off of the solid science done before them, each advancement tested as rigorously as our current level of technology has allowed for. A lot of predictions that the field has been responsible for have turned out more or less exactly as predicted. When science is making sound predictions before observation is possible, it starts to get really unbelievable to accept that one random paper will blow all of that work to hell. It would truly be unprecedented, even massive advancements like relativity didn't stand the world of science on it's head and make a mockery of it's most advanced work at the time like this would.

To sit back and play the "nobody knows" game is intellectually lazy. There are in fact many things "known", through observation. Just because you don't understand the work being done and what it's telling us about our universe doesn't even remotely mean that none among the entire race aren't a bit more in tune with the working of the universe than you are.
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MindzEye said:
JohnnyHolmes said:
MindzEye said:
I forgot a backslash...that's all you've got man? I mean, grammar nazi is some gay shit, but format nazi is something entirely worse.

None of that mini rant has anything to do with science though, which is what you're suggesting is wildly inaccurate here. The amount of science that these findings would prove false is massive and far reaching. I don't think you really grasp how much accumulated work that has been rigorously verified would be proven wrong here.

These people aren't just stabbing in the dark man, their work is based off of the solid science done before them, each advancement tested as rigorously as our current level of technology has allowed for. A lot of predictions that the field has been responsible for have turned out more or less exactly as predicted. When science is making sound predictions before observation is possible, it starts to get really unbelievable to accept that one random paper will blow all of that work to hell. It would truly be unprecedented, even massive advancements like relativity didn't stand the world of science on it's head and make a mockery of it's most advanced work at the time like this would.

To sit back and play the "nobody knows" game is intellectually lazy. There are in fact many things "known", through observation. Just because you don't understand the work being done and what it's telling us about our universe doesn't even remotely mean that none among the entire race aren't a bit more in tune with the working of the universe than you are.
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I didn't write the article.

Anyway, the nothing that exploded story is only slightly less ridiculous than the invisible man in the sky making the world with his hands story.

Sure we "know" there was an explosion, but we don't know what exploded, and we don't know what was before the explosion. That's not lazy, that's just fact.
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Except you're saying that not knowing what happened before the explosion, somehow negates what we know about said explosion...and that believing in such things is somehow on equal footing to people believing in fairytales.

Which is ridiculous.
 
Montana said:
Except you're saying that not knowing what happened before the explosion, somehow negates what we know about said explosion...and that believing in such things is somehow on equal footing to people believing in fairytales.

Which is ridiculous.
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Huh?

We "know' things until someone proves otherwise, which is what may have happened here. If she is right, then a lot of things we "know" about the universe are wrong.
 
Her paper, which likely won't be proven to be accurate (honestly, it's foolish to even be wasting time discussing shit like this that hasn't been peer reviewed yet).....but even if it were, it wouldn't mean "black holes dont exist" or "the Big Bang didn't happen"......it would simply mean that our definitions had been slightly off, and would require slightly altered guidelines.

Just like when Newtonian physics was "disproven" it didn't mean that all engineering students then had to stop using it the next day because it had been proven "wrong".......we still know it to be wrong today, and why......but we also know that here on earth for 99.99% of its uses, it still works perfectly fine.

If you think the Big Bang is on par with religious mythology, you're clearly talking out your ass about a subject you know nothing about.
 
Montana said:
Her paper, which likely won't be proven to be accurate (honestly, it's foolish to even be wasting time discussing shit like this that hasn't been peer reviewed yet).....but even if it were, it wouldn't mean "black holes dont exist" or "the Big Bang didn't happen"......it would simply mean that our definitions had been slightly off, and would require slightly altered guidelines.

Just like when Newtonian physics was "disproven" it didn't mean that all engineering students then had to stop using it the next day because it had been proven "wrong".......we still know it to be wrong today, and why......but we also know that here on earth for 99.99% of its uses, it still works perfectly fine.

If you think the Big Bang is on par with religious mythology, you're clearly talking out your ass about a subject you know nothing about.
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Please tell me all about this big bang.
 
Interesting.

The theory was first proposed in 1927, but was controversial until 1965, when an accidental discovery supported the theory. Today, the most advanced astronomical observations show that the big bang theory is likely true.

The big bang theory reveals that the universe came from a state of dense, hot matter, but it tells nothing about how the matter got there, or whether anything else existed before the big bang (or even if the word “before” has any meaning when you’re talking about the beginning of time.

So...what I said.

Cool.
 
The headlines are apparently misconstruing the paper. It does not disprove black holes or the big bang, but rather potentially solves a paradox around black holes where quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity don't really work together. it would improve our understanding of blackholes, and it might mean that black holes aren't created in ways that we thought they were.

Frankly, its pretty insane stuff that I don't really understand, so its no surprise that the daily mail doesn't either.

Here is a good article on it: https://briankoberlein.com/2014/09/25/yes-virginia-black-holes/

The focus of both of these papers is on the firewall paradox, specifically how Hawking radiation might affect the gravitational collapse of a star to form a black hole.

The firewall paradox is something that arises when you try to combine black holes with quantum theory. In quantum theory there are limits to what can be known about an object. For example, you cannot know an object’s exact energy. Because of this uncertainty, the energy of a system can fluctuate spontaneously, so long as its average remains constant. In 1974 Stephen Hawking demonstrated is that near the event horizon of a black hole pairs of particles can appear, where one particle becomes trapped within the event horizon (reducing the black holes mass slightly) while the other can escape as radiation (carrying away a bit of the black hole’s energy). These escaping particles have come to be known as Hawking radiation.

According to general relativity, if you were to fall into a black hole, you shouldn’t notice anything strange when you cross the event horizon. Yes, you might feel strong tidal forces, but you’d feel those outside the black hole as well. But according to quantum theory if all this Hawking radiation is being created near the event horizon, then you should experience a firewall of quantum particles. The solution to this theoretical problem is still a matter of some debate. Some, such as Hawking and the authors of this new paper, feel that the Hawking firewall prevents black hole horizons from forming. Others, such as Sabine Hossenfelder argue that quantum theory doesn’t lead to a Hawking firewall. Just to be clear, I’m personally in the Hossenfelder camp.

In this new paper, the authors show that if the Hawking firewall idea is correct, then as a star starts collapsing at the end of its life, before it collapses into a black hole Hawking radiation starts kicking in, which pushes back against the collapsing star. So instead of collapsing into a solar-mass black hole, the star almost collapses into a black hole, Hawking radiation stops its collapse, and the stellar core then explodes. So the star dies in a supernova explosion, but no black hole is formed from its core.
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so apparently they are able to make paralyzed rats walk with electrical impulses. cool.
 
JohnnyHolmes said:
Interesting.

The theory was first proposed in 1927, but was controversial until 1965, when an accidental discovery supported the theory. Today, the most advanced astronomical observations show that the big bang theory is likely true.

The big bang theory reveals that the universe came from a state of dense, hot matter, but it tells nothing about how the matter got there, or whether anything else existed before the big bang (or even if the word “before” has any meaning when you’re talking about the beginning of time.

So...what I said.

Cool.
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You don't understand the language of science...

The word "theory" doesn't mean what you think it means.
 
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