I didnt mean my point to be taken that literally so I apologize, as I think I fixed by re phrasing it later on. My point was essentially what voyager wrote, in an effort to emphasize the difference between religions and science that there are rewards for finding incorrect information, and that any time the theory is used is a test.
I’d like you to reconsider what you said here. In that there is always great reward in finding incorrect information if your information is accepted, no matter the field. It is the issue of getting your findings accepted that is the challenge, especially as a lay person regardless of the correctness of information. Perhaps science has a easier time with this, though from my political past I’ve heard that scientist that don’t go along with the conventional wisdom about global warming are simply ignored. I don’t know how much truth there is to that (as that is from politics), but it does sound like normal human behavior, and I don’t know if science has been able to over come this to the degree you seem to give it credit.
Are you perhaps giving science a bit too much credit to overcome such human tenancies?
Kanicbird is not interested in truth(facts) just belief,that is his right, but there is no point as I see it in debating someone who isn’t interest in the truth. he just expects everyone to believe him!
For any of the physical sciences all you really need to do is find a situation to prove your point, recreate it in a way that shows different results than other theories predict, and just repeat until there are no other explanations than yours. This is less possible with theoretical work of course.
You bring the lay person into scientific progress. A lay person, as you noted, does not have the tools to directly try to argue against these facts. A layman may be able to understand how a theory works but not the “why’s”. With that being said, any lay person can challenge an accepted rule by using the method above. Their route would just be different in being they would have to get an expert to examine the situation. The lay person could show an anomaly, but wouldn’t know what it was or what was causing it. As we mentioned earlier, science is all about defining laws and theories. You can not define a law you don’t understand, but you can experience it and understand it doesn’t comply with your understanding of current theories/laws.
Science is indeed a subject tainted by human tendencies (all human work is). The backbone of it is that regardless of whether people agree or not, if you can logically show your truth they must eventually agree to it or be seen as fools. For 99% of science there is no vested interest. For new fields and findings (global warming) people take that attitude because it is a political hotspot, and many of the people who oppose it are basing their opposition on misinformation. The basics of science are all based in hard, physical testable things: Math, chemistry, physics. Global warming is an offshoot based on predictions from those core subjects, and thus there is a degree of speculation possible. The facts are that certain gasses create a greenhouse effect, there are more of those certain gasses, we can expect a temperature rise. Any people who argue this are being silly. The ones who make proper arguments which do not deny the facts stated (without proof) are listened to. If you want to challenge the facts you must provide proof and reasoning to your position.
I dont think it is fair to say that all science is affected by human tendencies, especially when “science” as commonly defined is essentially biology, chemistry, math, and physics.
Are you saying the Einstein somehow made the apparent location of Mercury change to agree with his theory? (Backs away slowly.)
Aristotle published. The Roman natural philosophers published. It wasn’t lack of publication, it was the methodology they employed.
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
The Bible has detailed predictions. The ones that are in parts written after the fact are spot on (like the witches predictions in Macbeth.) The others, like the return of Jesus, not so much. The Messiah prophecies, not so much either.
You have to write these things down or they are worthless. Psychics brag about their correct predictions - in January various skeptic publications often publish their predictions from the year before to show how off base they are.
Predicting a range is still a detailed prediction, because it takes various factors which are uncertain into account.
And that is what science is all about. We postulate that there is reality, and we try to discover the rules by which it works. But discovering the rules does not affect reality.
You should read about this. Basically, Einstein said that the gravitational field of the sun should distort the light we get from Mercury, making its position appear to be different from what is predicted by classical Newtonian physics. After WW I an expedition was sent out to measure this during a total solar eclipse, when observations were possible. If the measurements came out as predicted by classical physics relativity would be pretty much falsified. But they came out as Einstein predicted. That was when Einstein became famous, and a synonym for genius.
The same principle accounts for gravitational lensing, which makes a galaxy behind a large gravitational source, like a black hole, look like two galaxies. There is even a book on this subject, which you should read. It is written for the non-specialist.
A lot of your points are very well taken. And you have made a distinction between ‘hard science’ and other types.
One thing that came to mind is who is in control of the ability to challenge. This come sup, back to the political aspect, where it was claimed that supposedly distinguished scientists were simply denied the ability to publish their findings because it did not agree with the accepted model (of global warming).
So how hard is it to overturn a incorrect theory. How accommodating is science to overcome human the tendencies to keep things status quo?
You paint a pretty ideal picture of science, where anyone can announce a discrepancy and then other scientists pick up on that and will continue to probe that till the error is found one way or another.
But is that actually how it works? Do people really have a fair shot at pointing out discrepancies in a way that gets recognized? Or does it happen perhaps only occasionally, with most being ignored?
Remember this just a proposed alternate model.
That is what this model would suppose. Or as in scriptures how Jesus changed the weather and all that other like stuff. The powers given to God’s children. In this model we determine the reality we inhabit.
If we generally and corporately believe there is no such thing as perpetual motion we will not see it. As we learn about the laws of thermodynamics it solidifies that we can’t have it even more. When someone with enough belief is able to make it (because that person is a god doing god things, and a god can do perpetual motion), as it is announced, now it not only has to exist in what this god has created, but also have to agree with what all the other gods have created, and the other gods collectively are more powerful, and the perpetual motion machine can no longer exist because of the many beliefs it can not.
This would explain some alleged inventions/discoveries that are not able to be duplicated, such as many of Tesla’s inventions and cold fusion.
Interesting, I though you were kidding about this, even more so when it seemed you were saying that a expedition was sent to Mercury to check this out 
The people who are in control of what gets published are the editors of scientific journals. Generally there are a couple editors that read each piece and try to poke holes in it (as they are at fault if it is wrong and published, they need to find the problems themselves). Anyone can submit an article to a journal.
To overturn a theory could be incredibly hard or incredibly easy depending on your proof and reasoning.
You could say “you guys predict mars is at x,y,z. I predict Mars is at x1,y1,z1. They then measure and see who is correct.” If either is wrong, that theory is automatically discarded or modified (it has to be!). If one is right they need to make an explanation for why they came to that conclusion. If their explanation explains everything else just as well as the previous one, it will likely be accepted. You cant have a ridiculous explanation like “I predicted that because the speed of light is actually 10 km/h.” Whether your explanation is seen as ridiculous and actually is or not is another matter, and could cause your idea to be slow to catch on. In the end, if your position is true, no matter how many new discoveries are made, your theory will still be in tact and you can keep piping up and showing you’re right. Eventually something will have to give.
I may paint a pretty picture based on the fact Im in university, and my profs are very open to discussing things and explaining the “what and why’s” and entertaining ideas which they know aren’t right in order to teach. I am only writing this based on my experiences.
But is it not more likely that they are in fact lying? It is very easy to lie, especially at the prospect of easy money.
Here is a scientific exercise for you which might be illuminating. Try to come up with a model of the world in which your hypothesis is true, and come up with some ways in which that world is different from a world in which reality is immutable. Surely there are some. Now, observe the world as it is, and see which of these hypotheses are falsified.
That’s how we do it. Coming up with hypotheses is good. Telling them to other people without at least an initial attempt to falsify them will get you a bad reputation as a nut. Only talking about the ones which pass initial and well-planned attempts at falsification will get you a reputation as a creative genius. There is a fine line …
Mercury would be the last place to visit. I think they went to the South Seas if I remember correctly. Not quite so hot and better looking natives.
I don’t think there is evidence that either of these cases involved lies. Tesla was, to quote Richard Thompson, “mad beyond belief” at one point, and Pons and Fleishmann were so caught up in dreams of the Nobel Prize and riches (and sticking it to the physicists, perhaps) that they made mistakes through self delusion. Which is probably far more often the case than lying.
Feynman talked about how Miliken got the mass of the electron wrong, and how published results slowly migrated from his value to the correct value over the years. No lies, just fear of not getting the “right” answer.
And the cold fusion experiments were reproduced - just not the results. That seems to indicate the “inventors” were mistaken. Anyhow, Steve Jobs had a reality distortion field, there is no evidence that Pons has one.
Yes lying may have been a poor term, mistaken, or blinded would be better. I certainly didnt mean it directly to the examples given, but more-so to the general idea of such theories (no hate for tesla here..).
Thank you for this insight.
And I appreciate that.
And I do agree with your premise, though I may state it differently, that science has been used in making many great products that we enjoy today.
There are certainly motivations to deceive and one can deceive one self.
Though I do believe there is something more then meets the eye so to speak. While some such claims can be false, I don’t believe all of them are.
The alternate model that I have expressed here has been something I have been tinkering with and exploring. It is based on the premise of we are actually gods (and children of big G God). But gods that disbelieve that we are gods and only mere people, due to their god powers, would be people.
I tend to believe in unlimited human capacity. For quite some time I have taken the laws and theories of science as barriers to our unlimited capacity. And perhaps to some degree they are. But mainly due to your posts, I have begun to see them in a different way, that they are expanded abilities instead of limits. For instance, instead of thinking the speed of light as the max speed (which limits us), to consider it as a speed we know how to approach at this time (which leaves open for faster travel when we figure it out - or get help).
Voyager what you propose appears to be a very daunting task. To put it in a way that may be more understandable to someone more science minded, I’ve heard a criticism of string theory being that it is so flexible it can basically be made to do anything, and after all the alternate model I am considering is that we are gods, so anything is possible. Sort of run into the same issue.
Just want to address this via the alternate model.
If you, perhaps 50 years ago, were able to tap in to today’s advanced technology in your mind. You would have a very hard time to reproduce it today, because you would not have the tools to make such devices with any level of reproducibly or reliability. Also perhaps without complete understanding of how to make materials needed that are commonly made now.
Though you may be able to make something that could work for a short time, enough for you to see it works though that’s about it. No one else would see it as it is now broken and you don’t and can’t know why. You would appear ‘mad’ as Tesla is described. Though Tesla’s reaction to the advanced discoveries in this model now seems normal.
Yes it can be daunting.
As for string theory, it should really be called string hypotheses. Advocates, like Brian Greene, are quite vocal about the limitations of our current understanding, and don’t at all deny the need for experimental verification. They are looking for ways to do so without needed to build solar system wide accelerators. If I understand him correctly, and I’m no expert, the breakthroughs are around discovering how various approaches turn out to be equivalent, which is an encouraging sign that there is something real here. But no proof.