[Closed] Anyone believe in UFO's?

I'll jump in without having read the full thread.

I have seen UFOs and am inclined to believe they may be some sort of secret weapons system as opposed to anything from distant planets. I have a great video called "The Secret Nasa Transmissions" which show a lot of these from the actual shuttles.

In terms of do alien life forms exist in other worlds, yes I do believe that is the case, but then from a shamanic perspective you can go into this in terms of other dimensions of reality which is a little off topic.

One thing I am looking out for is a faked alien attack, possibly during the Olympics so that the powers that be can really lock us down. But hey, who knows what is going to happen during these Olympics ay?

GrahamS - Member
I could well be getting trolled here, but sharing knowledge is always good so:

You're not getting trolled, but you are missing the point, your number sequencing is off as well, they (3+3) fingered aliens would 'teen' their units at 6 if they have two arms, or 9 if they had three, but it's all hypothetical, I'm simply trying to point out the arrogance of a ten fingered society in assuming their 'science' is correct over all others.

I've had time to look at that light explanation but it still doesn't explain how light cannot be viewed 'side on' to the stream of light 'particles', nor how electrons can generate 'particles' when they have no mass.

We don't really know that much about the dinosaurs though do we, for all we know what we've found are the remains of safari parks and that era was populated by a reptilian species.

The bottom line is that evolution is a natural process and sooner or later beings like us will evolve, some of which will have cilisations millions if not billions of years old.

How many stars are there again is forget

Time/gravity is only a factor in terms of travel if you do not know the correct electro magnetic frequency to displace it

nor how electrons can generate 'particles' when they have no mass.

electrons have mass.

your number sequencing is off as well

It is correct for 3 fingers in total, as I stated, which is also what you originally said: [i]what would have happened to science had we evolved with three digits instead of ten[/i]

Yes if they had six fingers then the sequence would look like ... 4, 5, 10, 11..

I'm simply trying to point out the arrogance of a ten fingered society in assuming their 'science' is correct over all others.

But what you are actually ably demonstrating is that maths is a universal regardless of how many fingers you have.
No arrogance required. That 'science' remains correct if you call your number "five" or "Geoff"

still doesn't explain how light cannot be viewed 'side on' to the stream of light 'particles'

I have no idea why you think photons mean it should be. Explain??

Perhaps this may help? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon

Or try this explanation:

Thanks for the info/link kaesae.
I'm not convinced that the strength of it qualifies as "substantial evidence that proves those theories", but it certainly adds to the picture and makes interesting reading.

Wow. I missed happy hour.

Best if you research it for yourself

No, sorry, it doesn't work like that. You don't get to make controversial statements and then when reasonably asked to elaborate go "oh, look it up." You need to either substantiate your claims or have them dismissed.

for all we know what we've found are the remains of safari parks and that era was populated by a reptilian species who left no evidence of their existence except for their safari parks

I'm simply trying to point out the arrogance of a ten fingered society in assuming their 'science' is correct over all others.

The speed of light in a vacuum is the speed of light, absolute zero is absolute zero. having nothing is zero, Some things are absolutes and we have found a few of them. It is not arrogant to know this. It would be arrogance to think we knew them all

As a pointless aside there are some things we know that we cannot prove such as every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. I am not sur ethis is arrogance either but it is interesting*.
* life may be non carbon base for example.
** ok it probably is not interesting

apologies in advance (haven't read the rest of this thread 😳

i saw something pretty strange back in the mid/late 90's (along with a friend who was a passenger in my car).
it was night time (cloudy as no stars in the sky).
we were coming back from bath (to drop my friend off in trowbridge).
anyhoo i was driving up a road called sally in the woods (you can see the whole of bath on your right as you are driving back to bradford on avon).
anyways my friend suddenly said to me "what is that!?"
i looked to my right and up in the sky was a white light.
"it's a helicopter flood light" i thought to myself
but it was spherical/white and perfectly motionless in the sky.
well it was for around 10 seconds when without warning,no sound it just shot off at high speed.
not gradually build up to a high speed, just instantaneously shot off 😯 😮
i obviously cannot say that it was an alien craft,but it certainly wasn't anything ordinary [img] ?1292867693[/img]

Could it have been ball lightning raceface?

Say hello to ALH84001, a 4.5 billion year-old lump of rock from Mars that fell to Earth.

[img] [/img]

It contains embedded magnetite crystals in formations of carbonates that are characteristic of aquatic magnetotactic bacteria that existed on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. Since the rock fell to Earth "recently", it follows that the bacteria lived and died on Mars.

This is not 100% conclusive without going to Mars and observing the formations in-situ. But it is 99% conclusive that this bacteria was living on Mars about the same time as similar bacteria was living on Earth.

There was life on Mars.

How did it fall ?

i looked to my right and up in the sky was a white light.
"it's a helicopter flood light" i thought to myself
but it was spherical/white and perfectly motionless in the sky.
well it was for around 10 seconds when without warning,no sound it just shot off at high speed.
not gradually build up to a high speed, just instantaneously shot off

almost exactly the same as something i observed (along with my sister) around 80-81 in the south east, there was a story in the local paper that week about somebody who said they were visited by a UFO at a golf course which was roughly where we thought the 'thing' was (it looked as if it was about 1 mile away). not saying i believe in ufo's but i definitely witnessed something out of the ordinary.

Sorry Buzz but referencing that New Scientist article linked to earlier, it does not appear to be quite that clear cut:

Careful analysis revealed that the rock contained organic molecules and tiny specs of the mineral magnetite, sometimes found in Earth bacteria. Under the electron microscope, NASA researchers also claimed to have spotted signs of "nanobacteria".

But since then much of the evidence has been challenged. Other experts have suggested that the particles of magnetite were not so similar to those found in bacteria after all, and that contaminants from Earth are the source of the organic molecules. A 2003 study also showed how crystals that resemble nanobacteria could be grown in the laboratory by chemical processes.

-- http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9943-top-10-controversial-pieces-of-evidence-for-extraterrestrial-life.html?full=true

But it is still quite compelling:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/marslife.html
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/403099main_GCA_2009_final_corrected.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001

Sorry there cougar, but you're wrong.
Kaesae has made some forthright statements, and I did ask for elaboration.
But , fair enough, that was forthcoming;
As well as the advice that its "best if you research it yourself".
I'm happy to accept that he's right there. That's part of scientific enquiry. Do you own research, think for yourself, don't expect everything handed to you on a plate.
Whilst the links and information are interesting and deserve further thought and enquiry, as I said above, I don't yet believe that the statements were proved conclusively.
However, that does not mean you or I get to dismiss them outright.
This isn't an inquisition, its a chat forum. 😉

How did it fall ?

Downwards.

This isn't an inquisition, its a chat forum

Who's side are you on? (-:

I wholeheartedly approve of 'do your own research', you're quite right. However, if you're going to state something as fact, you have to cite your sources. All credible texts have a bibliography for this reason. Hell, even Wikipedia mandates it. You don't see "[1] - look it up."

Do you own research, think for yourself, don't expect everything handed to you on a plate.

Downwards.

It fell off Mars "downwards" ?

I had assumed that it needed to go upwards. Do lots of rocks fall off Mars then ?

It may have left Mars going up, but it was definitely going down by the time it got here 😉

There is no up, nor down in space, just outwards and inwards - I think.

Sorry. My wording was too harsh. It (the inquisition comment) was meant tongue in cheek, but tone can be hard to convey in text,even with smileys. no offence intended.
My point was I am happy to listen to ideas. And don't need to dismiss them just because they haven't been proved conclusively.
I wasn't expecting 100% proof when I questioned this above. Its a chat forum about belief in UFOs, there will be theories that differ from the mainstream. Just by the nature of the subject I believe you have to be ready to accept partial evidence, probabillities and possibilities. Or at least be open to the possibillity that we can't all share the same body of knowlege and understanding. Even more so when the talk is of the history of 3000 years. For me, there's a massive grey area in this subject, and very little black and white. Even common theories like Drake give vastly different results depending on open assuptions.
For me, a thread subject like this is more about sharing ideas than coming to a conclusion.

It may have left Mars going up

Someone threw it ?

From the proposed timeline in the NASA article ernie:

16 million years ago, a large meteorite struck Mars, dislodging a large chunk of this rock and ejecting it into space. (Based on the cosmic ray exposure age of the meteorite)

Well I'll be. They can't tell what the weather will be this time next week but they know what happened on planet Mars 16 million years ago - what hit what and where it ended up. That's amazing.

You're a teacher right? I bet you are, only the sort of low grade teachers there are around these days can be so arrogant and closed minded to think that.. What's your subject? tell me it's not physics purrlease.

Then read the entire thread before coming in and spouting meaningless googled drivel

FWIW I have no idea why you got banned or why you think it was me what done it. I bear no grudge even if you do and you choose to vent it at any given opportunity.

"nanobacteria".

Yeah it's not clear cut for sure. The magnetite itself is not that strong evidence for organic origin but it's collocation with carbonates that is difficult to explain away apparently.

Then there is the methane abundance problem

And the re evaluation of the Viking experiment

And certainty that mars was wet planet in its geological history which means it had a substantial temperate atmosphere.

And the abundance of water ice under the dust

My wording was too harsh.

No, it wasn't.

You're right that it's hard to put tongues in cheeks when keyboards have neither of these things. I try to assume that people are being light-hearted and friendly when they type, and tend to assume that people think the same of me. Sadly, the latter assumption has bitten me in the arse a lot more than the former.

What I'm saying is, no offence taken. I appreciate the apology but you've nothing to apologise for.

They can't tell what the weather will be this time next week but they know what happened on planet Mars 16 million years ago

I expect it's a lot easier to reliably extrapolate backwards than forwards.

I expect it's a lot easier to reliably extrapolate backwards than forwards.

Obviously ! 🙂

derekrides - it is a sign that you are beaten if you jsut insult JY, he has been patiently batting off your objections and gently trying to lead you to the light. Perhps the reason why you are not a scientisit or seem to want to learn anythign about science is that you just don't like it.

[b]Awards in this thread so far:[/b]

GrahamS, junky and cougar for admirably battling away whilst maintaining their tempers, some erudite and smart posts.

MrSalmon for being the threads version of John Steinbeck.

kayak23 for being the king of irony and sarcasm (the book joke at the beginning)

Bwaarp for using science like a club and beating the crap out of anyone who disagrees, he never had a temper to lose. A man after my own heart. When the patient teachers above die of boredom from bangign their heads against a brick wall science will wheel out their champion..

yunki and derekrides for getting all po-mo on our asses.

All get tea and medals on the lawn and a [b]spitfire flypast[/b].

mrsmith and raceface do you guys know about Iridium flares? I was very nearly convinced that UFO's exist when I saw one of these a few years ago.
Now I can predict them and make my ignorant friends think I am some kind of god.. [url= http://www.heavens-above.com/?lat=50.72673&lng=-3.51202&loc=Unspecified&alt=0&tz=CET ]linky[/url]

JY has his own deep seated psychological problems

Well in that case you better let him deal with them, whilst you concentrate on dealing with yours.

off the wall thinking, you'll note nothing espoused by me is anything other than left field speculation as to an alternative view

It's such a shame for the rest of us that you have failed to link the above with the below.

As for po-mo, no idea what that means

Also read this [url= http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html ]transgressing the boundaries[/url]

From my link, written by someone who really knows how to question science.

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical reality'', no less than social reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

Wow that's a lot of words.

yup worth reading though

Isn't that known as "the flight from reason"?

gender encoding in fluid mechanics

Heh.

yup worth reading though

Meh just seems like exactly the kind of mystic hand-wavey new age stoner nonsense that derek and yunki were spouting.

well at least you bothered to read it, doesn't look like Derek has.

I struggle with long sentences, have you got the Cliff Notes?

We covered postmodernism and post strucuralism in a module at Uni dealing with "systems theory"

I honestly couldn't get my head round the whole physical laws are just part of our social contruct thing. It just seemed so pointlessly stultifying, being awkward for the sake of it.

I Invited my lecturer to test if gravity was a social construct by opening the window and carrying out the lecture from the other side. She politely declined - we were on the fourth floor!

I offered to hit my lecturer with a chair and they could tell me when they thought that the physical reality was real rather than made up ...they declined that invitation as well 😉

Interesting only the scientist actually read the data 😉

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Liberatory Science

Over the past two decades there has been extensive discussion among critical theorists with regard to the characteristics of modernist versus postmodernist culture; and in recent years these dialogues have begun to devote detailed attention to the specific problems posed by the natural sciences.75 In particular, Madsen and Madsen have recently given a very clear summary of the characteristics of modernist versus postmodernist science. They posit two criteria for a postmodern science:

A simple criterion for science to qualify as postmodern is that it be free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth. By this criterion, for example, the complementarity interpretation of quantum physics due to Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen school is seen as postmodernist.76

Clearly, quantum gravity is in this respect an archetypal postmodernist science. Secondly,

The other concept which can be taken as being fundamental to postmodern science is that of essentiality. Postmodern scientific theories are constructed from those theoretical elements which are essential for the consistency and utility of the theory.77

Thus, quantities or objects which are in principle unobservable -- such as space-time points, exact particle positions, or quarks and gluons -- ought not to be introduced into the theory.78 While much of modern physics is excluded by this criterion, quantum gravity again qualifies: in the passage from classical general relativity to the quantized theory, space-time points (and indeed the space-time manifold itself) have disappeared from the theory.

However, these criteria, admirable as they are, are insufficient for a liberatory postmodern science: [b]they liberate human beings from the tyranny of absolute truth'' and objective reality'',[/b] but not necessarily from the tyranny of other human beings. In Andrew Ross' words, we need a science that will be publicly answerable and of some service to progressive interests.''79 From a feminist standpoint, Kelly Oliver makes a similar argument:

... in order to be revolutionary, feminist theory cannot claim to describe what exists, or, natural facts.'' Rather, feminist theories should be political tools, strategies for overcoming oppression in specific concrete situations. The goal, then, of feminist theory, should be to develop strategic theories -- not true theories, not false theories, but strategic theories.

It is an interesting , if complicated in parts, debate about uncertainty , the unknowable and finally I get to mention Godel and godelisation YAH.
However i am with Graham on this it does seem a bit wishy washy and offer a solution for resolving some confusing issues that dont really make much sense to me [ the solution that is] tbh

There is truth and their is fact [ i can accept that in certain areas it may not be binary [ true or false] but not for everything. I also like it when they use science to attack science ie using uncertainty to prove that science does not work when uncertainty comes form science so perhaps that is the bit that is wrong?

Anyway nice link if not for the faint hearted or the ill informed

By this criterion, for example, the complementarity interpretation of quantum physics due to Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen school is seen as postmodernist.

Displays a fundamental lack of understanding of what quantum physics actaully is.

QP isn't imprecise it describe with incredible accuracy what goes on. It doesn't reject physical laws, it replaces them with more accurate versions.

Its not wishy washy its just piffle! Nonsense couched in academic speak to make unconstructed ramblings baffling enough for readers to think there must be meaning somewhere.

Borrowing from the language of science in one breath and then critisizing it in another.

Try typing a response on a post-modern computer!

we should have used the scientific oracle that is Google - see i think first Derek 😉

Sokal is best known to the general public for the Sokal Affair of 1996. Curious to see whether the then-non-peer-reviewed postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University Press) would publish a submission which "flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions," Sokal submitted a grand-sounding but completely nonsensical paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."[3][4]

The journal did in fact publish it, and soon thereafter Sokal then revealed that the article was a hoax in the journal Lingua Franca,[5] arguing that the left and social science would be better served by intellectual underpinnings based on reason. He replied to leftist and postmodernist criticism of the deception by saying that his motivation had been to "defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself."

The affair, together with Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's book Higher Superstition, can be considered to be a part of the so-called Science wars.

Sokal followed up by co-authoring the book Impostures Intellectuelles with Jean Bricmont in 1997 (published in English, a year later, as Fashionable Nonsense). The book accuses other academics of using scientific and mathematical terms incorrectly and criticizes proponents of the strong program for denying the value of truth. The book had mixed reviews, with some lauding the effort[citation needed], some more reserved[6][7], and others pointing out alleged inconsistencies and criticizing the authors for ignorance of the fields under attack and taking passages out of context.[8]

In 2008, Sokal revisited the Sokal affair and its implications in Beyond the Hoax.

Not sure if the poster who linked to it here knew or did not know but they get to choose which ever option best flatters them 😀

For Graham...x

junky check your email's I sent you an hour ago, you pillock, you buggered my trick. Anyway your first post after reading it, you fell for it..

I'm confiscating your tea and medals, and when the spitfires fly past one of them is going to open up the Browning 303's on you..

I cannot access my e-mail at work and sorry it would have been a good ruse

Aye I did treat it as real,...but i always had you down as the honest type , forgive me 😉

The funny thing about both you and rich saying this :

I offered to hit my lecturer with a chair and they could tell me when they thought that the physical reality was real rather than made up ...they declined that invitation as well

I Invited my lecturer to test if gravity was a social construct by opening the window and carrying out the lecture from the other side. She politely declined - we were on the fourth floor!

When it is one of Sokal's most famous quotes:

Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)

Well played toys

To be fair I did spot it was bullshit, i just didn't spot it was deliberate bullshit.

I like it though. Its a bit like the experiment psychiartic students carried out on mental hopitals in the sixties to demonstrate alot of mental health diagnoses were a sham

[url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment ]Rosenhan Experiment[/url]

To be fair I did spot it was bullshit, i just didn't spot it was deliberate bullshit.

I think that was Sokal's point, that post modernism was a form of bullshit (intentional or not) that was indishtinguishable from actual, real live, deliberate bullshit. It makes me smirk every every time.

The Rosenshan expt is another piece of awesomeness that I like. It's a reflection of our modern society.

Somebody needs to do the same thing with the police, devise a way of getting innocent people into the hands of an arresting officer, custody sargeant and CPS and see if the same thing happens.....

"I am convinced that it is the Coppers job to "diagnose" criminals , so if you get stopped by the cops they will find some "symptom" or other that identifies you as a wrong doer and off to court you go. .."

skimmed through this thread.

So is the argument is whether science is real?

I always remember the startling fact that the patients [ the mad] are better at spotting the sane than the medically qualified sane.

The debate was about whether science could find universal truths or any kind of truth. Detractors felt that we were either just being arrogant or all knowledge was uncertain and we could not prove/know anything - ie we may just be bacteria on the Petri dish

@Junkyard - thanks

What a strange argument.

For Graham...x

Oh great now, the [i]"protective powers of the universe are activated"[/i] in my office. The cleaners are not going to be happy about this.

(is it me or does it sound like they are chanting "Goin' up your ring eh")

So is the argument is whether science is real?

I think the main thrust has been pro-scientists saying [i]"we don't know everything, but we do know a couple of important things"[/i] versus the post-modernist stoners saying [i]"you're so arrogrant, how can you possibly claim to know everything??"[/i] 😀

So is the argument is whether science is real?

no.. I think the argument is more whether or not real is science..

I notice a few times 'pro-science' is mentioned a few times...are there people on here who are openly 'anti-science'?

Yunki keeping it real since pharmaceuticals were discovered [ by scientists] for keeping it real 😉

are there people on here who are openly 'anti-science'?

no.. certainly not on this thread

although you wouldn't have thought it by the way the pro-science lobby so quickly circle their wagons and started shooting at anything that moves..

very peculiar I reckon.. such an aggressive defence indicates a deep underlying insecurity in my opinion.. maybe they are not so sure of the facts as they like to so loudly proclaim..?

I'm not quite sure why you need to keep referencing the fact that I used drugs in my youth Junkyard..? It's quite a personal attack.. from such a black pot.. 😉

very peculiar I reckon.. such an aggressive defence indicates a deep underlying insecurity in my opinion.. maybe they are not so sure of the facts as they like to so loudly proclaim..?

I'd make a good defence of 1+1 always making 2 if someone was trying to argue that it doesn't. That doesn't mean I've got some deep underlying insecurity about whether it's true or not.

no.. I think the argument is more whether or not real is science..

Genuinely lolled at that one.

Anyway back on topic.

UFO's no, Aliens yes.

Here's my reasoning.

I did a bit a wild camping at Easter on a beach on Islay, needless to say sand got everywhere. As I was walking back to the car and brushing sand off all my gear and clothes the thought "Each grain a star" entered my head. Most of us will have have heard that there are roughly a similar number of stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. That beach on Islay was equivalent to our galaxy.

From the perspective of an individual grain of sand it was vast (for all practical purposes at that scale it was infinite). Thinking about the universe in similar terms (we aren't even a grain of sand) and it just becomes impossible to imagine there isn't other life out there.

But the very scale, the vastness of the near infinite, means that it does a very good impression of us being alone in it.

> are there people on here who are openly 'anti-science'?
no.. certainly not on this thread

Yunki is definitely not "anti-science".

I mean yeah, okay, he roundly dismisses chemistry, says spectroscopy is [i]"a religious cult"[/i] and claims that maths and physics are a [i]"con art invented by scraggly little toads who can't get laid "[/i].

And he describes the [i]"science monkeys"[/i] on here as [i]"narrow minded"[/i], [i]"insecure young men"[/i] who he repeatedly calls "arrogant" for claiming that [i]"the majority of science's work is done"[/i] and that has [i]"pretty accurately accounted for much of what we see around us"[/i] (despite the fact precisely no one has made such a claim).

But yeah, he is all about the pro-science 😆

It's quite a personal attack.. from such a black pot..

Racialist!

I'm not quite sure why you need to keep referencing the fact that I used drugs in my youth Junkyard..? It's quite a personal attack.. from such a black pot.

buuuuut..

all I've been saying throughout this thread, is can you accept that at some point in the future, someone may come along and say

'yes, 1+1 does indeed always make 2.. but what you didn't realise is that 1+1 is also the colour of a butterfly's contented sigh..'?

It just seems to me a little cultish that because a couple of people have suggested that there may be more to this than meets the eye you have all gotten rather upset..

Science is very neat and prosaic way of explaining what stuff is made of and how it works.. I just like to wonder if perhaps there is any more than that..
I don't particularly care if there is and certainly don't have faith in there being more.. I only have faith in music, beer and sex and laughter mostly.. I just think that deny any possibility of an alternative explanation is a bit.. err.. daft

😕

Science is very neat and prosaic way of explaining what stuff is made of and how it works.. I just like to wonder if perhaps there is any more than that..

If there is, and of course there is, then good luck finding it by "wondering".

I reckon science might beat you to it.

just think that deny any possibility of an alternative explanation is a bit.. err.. daft

You're missing the point though. Science [i]is[/i] all about seeking alternative explanations. Not accepting that thunder is created by a someone who lives at the end of a rainbow with a beard, a helmet and a hammer for instance.

Lots of people don't die of ulcers because an Australian doctor looked for an alternative explanation for them other than stress and spicy food. He discovered the H pylori bacteria which is responsible for the majority of peptic ulcers and can actually be quite easily treated.

If you want a nice example of science NOT being "neat and prosaic" and doing a good job of demonstrating that there IS something more, then I'd suggest you read up on [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement ]Quantum Entanglement[/url].

Take two particles, let them physically interact, then separate them by say 16km.

Now when you measure the state of one particle and the other will instantly adopt the "opposite" state, despite the fact there is no obvious connection between them.

Spooky.

'yes, 1+1 does indeed always make 2.. but what you didn't realise is that 1+1 is also the colour of a butterfly's contented sigh..'?

It just seems to me a little cultish that because a couple of people have suggested that there may be more to this than meets the eye you have all gotten rather upset..

Science is very neat and prosaic way of explaining what stuff is made of and how it works.. I just like to wonder if perhaps there is any more than that..
I don't particularly care if there is and certainly don't have faith in there being more.. I only have faith in music, beer and sex and laughter mostly.. I just think that deny any possibility of an alternative explanation is a bit.. err.. daft

Maybe someone will come along in the future and show us that 1+1 is the color of a butterfly's contented sigh- who knows? Although I don't think it's too likely 😉

But that idea is, well, useless. It's fun to ramble on about stuff like that in the pub, but it actually gets us absolutely nowhere. It's not testable, it can't form the basis of any models, it can't be used to help us learn anything more or make any more discoveries, or help us build computers or space probes to bring back samples from asteroids, or telescopes to see deeper into the universe.

Boring old narrow minded 1+1=2 [i]does[/i] let us do that, and by doing that we find out more and more, which might eventually get us round to butterfly sighs I suppose, or clean energy, or finding out that dogs can smell earthquakes or whatever. But we'll never get there by going "yeah, but... " whenever we set out what we do know. It's not arrogance, it's just getting on with it.

Science is actually out there constantly pushing back the envelope- actually finding out crazy new things and expanding our model of the universe, based on things we already know (as far as is possible) to be true.

If you think the way to expand our horizons is to dismiss that and instead sit about dreaming up untestable exceptions to rules and models that nobody anywhere has ever seen broken in the entire history of humanity then I think you can expect that some people are going to disagree!
It might be that those rules do have exceptions but there's only one way to find out.

Science is very neat and prosaic way of explaining what stuff is made of and how it works.. I just like to wonder if perhaps there is any more than that..

There's certainly more to life than science. Science is an orientation, an approach and a mode of understanding (having to do with number, measurement and identifying relationships). As the more pragmatic scientists have been saying, they do not make a claim to truth per se but rather that their approach does tend to bring results that are highly useful for society.

Much of this thread is underpinned by a weary invocation of CP Snow's Two Cultures and similar debates going back at least as far as the Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment. In this thread, the humanities have been utterly misrepresented ("militant postmodernist" being my favourite) and I'm guessing there are a few arts/humanities folk who are watching but staying out.

Science has given us many things over the years, the death of 99.8% of peoples interest in this thread, and a nice big old pissing contest tangent taken from its original topic being one... Nice one Science!

Inquiry takes us to all sorts of places! 😉

a nice big old pissing contest

going back at least as far as the Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment

At least we are in good company then 😀

Some [i]properly[/i] arrogant physics explaining everything:

It just seems to me a little cultish

Nice video link graham I will watch some of those with my kids.

Anyone here believe in UFO's? I know UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object but I mean in the sense of alien visitors.

If someone had traveled the vast distance to get here, it would be jolly rude if they didn't stop and say hello.

Nice video link graham I will watch some of those with my kids.

They are good - but quite fast paced. 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium is also good for simple "wow physics!" videos:

SixtySymbols videos, http://www.youtube.com/user/sixtysymbols are also excellent if you want a [i]little[/i] more depth:

Yay for YouTube. Not just for watching cats fall over.

bleurrrgh..

ok.. It seems that I've been utterly misunderstood..

I'm not anti-science, never have been never will be.. and I'm certainly not pro-stoner theory either.. I find both interesting in the same way that I enjoy art or cars or literature.. I'm extremely anti some of the stuff that was posted in this thread though..

When I said that to claim there is only our one periodic table in the entire universe seemed to me to be arrogant, it wasn't because I had a different theory that I thought was superior.. I was simply pondering the possibility of there being more out there to be discovered.. I certainly don't think science is useless.. and I don't claim to have a more useful way of doing things..
I'm glad that others are interested enough to care though.. and I fully appreciate the importance of science and the endless hard work..

I tried a bit of poorly judged caustic banter earlier in the thread which ruffled some feathers.. and caused some people to leap to conclusions about who I am and what I stand for..
I'm truly sorry for making this thread such a thoroughly disgusting display of quasi-intellectual posturing.. and that it degenerated into name calling and sarcasm and all round insolent vitriol..

FWIW I'm not really interested in the slightest in finding answers to the mysteries of life personally speaking.. like someone said it's a fun topic to ramble on in the pub..

I find all the answers I need in music, and in the twinkle of an eye, or the bottom of a glass, or atop a windswept moor..

I think I misunderstood what some posters were about.. your attitudes seemed at first glance to be completely closed to new ideas..and I [i]needed[/i] to challenge that.. (very poorly it turns out)

..and some of you (you know who you are) deliberately antagonised me at every opportunity.. **** s

When I said that to claim there is only our one periodic table in the entire universe seemed to me to be arrogant, it wasn't because I had a different theory that I thought was superior.. I was simply pondering the possibility of there being more out there to be discovered..

Can I pick this point up? [u]Not[/u] to dismiss you, but just to discuss it? Pub-stylee.

It is [i]possible[/i] that [i]somewhere[/i] in the vast universe, there are (some exotic equivalent of) chemical elements that are not made of atoms.

It is even [i]possible[/i] as you suggested earlier, that our solar system (or galaxy) is a bit unusual with all this atom stuff, and actually distant stars are made of these undiscovered non-atom elements which for some reason produce an emission spectrum that exactly matches our atom-based elements.

If quantum physics teaches us anything it's that we should expect counter-intuitive weirdness from the universe.

But... currently we have absolutely no reason to suspect that to be the case (other than random wonderings). The current atomic element model we have holds for everything we can test here, including everything we can observe from deep space, and it has allowed us to accurately predict and then create "new" elements that didn't previously exist on Earth.

So yes, claiming our periodic table is the only one we'd ever need to describe elements in the universe is perhaps a bold claim, but [i]so far[/i], justified.

ok.. I accept that.. couldn't see the woods for the trees earlier on.. 😳

I'm more than ready to turn a corner in this discussion.. and you've mentioned the observable universe a few times..

Now I don't even watch science docs on TV so excuse me if I get this muddled up..
What we can observe appears to be a doughnut shape..? Which is expanding or contracting or both.. I'm going to guess and say the reason that we see a doughnut shape could be a number of different things..

poor visibility with an unknown cause (dark matter etc..?)
wierd shaped universe
something else

ok

do we have any idea what is [i]beyond[/i] the observable universe..?

more universe..?
the dungeon dimensions..?
Dark Matter and/or other recent discoveries..?
the edge of the vacuum flask..?
chocolate butter cream..?
the final episode of Eastenders..?
god only knows..?

What we can observe appears to be a doughnut shape..?

IIRC, there was one theory that the universe might have a torus (doughnut) shape. I don't recall it being much more than a theory though.

The [i]observable[/i] universe is a sphere, because from a (relatively) single observation point we can observe as far in all directions. That has no bearing on the shape of the universe though, just how much of it we can see.

I think.

do we have any idea what is beyond the observable universe..?

We have [i]ideas,[/i] sure. I posted figures earlier, but our best guess is that the whole universe is 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger than the bit we can see.

It's even more fun that that.

"Observable Universe" really means two things:

There is the amount of universe we can observe/measure/detect from Earth with our current technology (I think I overstated this earlier: a bit of googling suggests that the furthest we have "seen" is about 30 billion light years).

But the true scientific meaning is the amount of the universe we could possibly "see" even if we had the best detectors that could ever be built because those galaxies are so far away that the light from them hasn't reached us yet and, due to the expansion of the universe, it never will. We will never see them from here.

That distance is reckoned to be around 46 billion light years from Earth.

do we have any idea what is beyond the observable universe..?

Ideas yes. Theories yes. "More universe" seems like the most likely.
But until someone volunteers to go a few billion light years away from us to find out, nothing is [i]absolutely[/i] certain. That would be arrogant 😉

Bear in mind though that this limit is just an arbitrary [i]"how far we can see from our planet"[/i]. There is nothing cosmologically [i]special[/i] about it - so no real reason to suspect that it's suddenly all marshmallows from 46.1 billion light years onwards.

Yunki this is for you:

I did a bit a wild camping at Easter on a beach on Islay, needless to say sand got everywhere. As I was walking back to the car and brushing sand off all my gear and clothes the thought "Each grain a star" entered my head. Most of us will have have heard that there are roughly a similar number of stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. That beach on Islay was equivalent to our galaxy.

From the perspective of an individual grain of sand it was vast (for all practical purposes at that scale it was infinite). Thinking about the universe in similar terms (we aren't even a grain of sand) and it just becomes impossible to imagine there isn't other life out there.

I want to return to my beach anaology and how it demonstrates a little about our understanding of the universe. So imagine you are a super smart microscopic person living on a grain of sand on a beach. You are so small that the grain of sand is on the scale of a planet to you.

But as I said you are super smart so you you have already worked out how some of the physical laws work on you grain of sand like gravity etc. From your grain of sand you can see lots of other grains of sand that look pretty similar to the one you live on so you assume quite naturally that the laws that work on your grain of sand are most likely the same on the others.

One day you invent a telescope and you peer across the entire beach and see that everywhere its just more grains of sand. "Wow!" you think "this beach is huge" but you realise its all just grains of sand, everywhere as far as your telescope can see. So you conclude that the physical laws that you have worked out are universal as the "universe" looks pretty much identical in every direction.

This is called the Copernican principle or the principle of mediocrity. Its not because science lacks imagination its a fundamental part of how physical laws are applied

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