Are you speaking quite literally here? Are you saying that there are 1st graders who literally (literally) do not consider it obvious that 1 + 1 = 2? That seems to me like a kid not understanding that a bottle is not empty if it is full.
Russell’s and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, one of the seminal works in the discipline:
People, on the subject of the Big Bang mswas is a conspiracy theorist. Read his first two posts in this thread. Highlights:
“So you’re saying that the Big Bang Theory has more Truthiness than Genesis?”
"The book of Genesis was an allegory written by stone-age people FOR stone-age people. The Big Bang theory was a theory written by space-age people FOR space-age people, and has the advantage of being logically elegant while being pretty much unverifiable. "
“I don’t believe in the ‘facts’ of the Big Bang anymore than I believe in the ‘facts’ of Genesis. Both essentially relate a great explosion of light creating all matter in the universe.”
Naw, he’s not trying to say that the two theories are equally credible at all :rolleyes:.
There’s skepticism, and there’s Just Asking Questions. The difference is when you’re a skeptic, you ask questions and listen to the answers. mswas is just asking.
But we can directly observe what happened earlier than that, like 99.9% of the time back towards the beginning. We can directly observe what was happening only 400,000 years after it started. And our physics models what happened earlier that that even. All that stuff is the Big Bang, even if we have no idea what led to its all starting.
Really, it is just like observing someone walking out of a room and deducing that he was in the room previously.
Some of us can.
Deliberate ignorance.
I find your lack of compassion for those afflicted with a lifetime struggle against obesity to be disturbing. Also your lack of faith. Ha. You clearly have never met anyone who have take every reasonable measure to lose weight and still have failed time and time again. Claiming that an obese person’s weight is merely a sign that they are weak or uncommitted is senseless cruelty. You don’t really seem to understand. Things as primitive and as taken for granted as the DESIRE to eat are completely under the control of biochemical reactions going on inside your body. These people are fighting an uphill battle, and belittling them with unsympathetic rationales like that will only bring depression, frustration, and self hate.
Yes, you are technically correct. If we took everyone who suffered from obesity, and threw them into a room with a month’s supply of vitamin pills (mind you, not all essential nutrients can be obtained from pills alone, at least not multivitamins as sold OTC. In addition, some nonessential nutrients become essential under starvation conditions) and locked the door, they would lose weight. No matter what is wrong with their metabolism, they are still subject to the laws of chemistry and physics. However, doing so would be unambiguously cruel. I’m speaking about matters as they exist in the real world. You can’t do something like that, and to suggest otherwise is… not cool.
I’m not claiming that people who are obese should be content with themselves as they are. Quite to the contrary, I believe they should try as hard as they can to lose weight. All I am saying is that the rest of society should not look down upon them because of their plight, and that they should know that breaking the cycle of obesity is like breaking any other addiction. Failure, and renewed enthusiasm are normal parts of the process.
I guess I am still puzzled where “obvious” comes into it at all.
A truth is not necessarily obvious…at all. Relativity seems pretty near truth as a theory can get and it was not at all obvious. Hell, Newton’s Laws were not obvious to the world for most of its existence.
Now, someone comes along and wants you to calculate artillery trajectories. According to mswas it seems since Newton’s Laws are not obvious we cannot assess their truth. Sure some propeller headed geek scientist might be arsed to look in to it but for the rest of us who cares? It has as much validity as the Bible because it is no more obvious than the Bible.
I believe the normal state of affairs when presented with a new idea is to do one of the following:
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Just accept that people looked at the issue and as long as they seem to have a broad consensus just take them at their word.
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Accept that others have done the hard work in good faith (setting up the experiment, recording data, etc.) and read up on what is being said and try to understand it yourself at least from a layman’s perspective.
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Go do the hard work yourself. Learn the minutiae of the field and do your own experiments and write papers for peer review.
Not seeing where “obvious” fits in there. Most things we learn are not obvious. Bridges, buildings, cars, computers and so on are not obvious. If they were people would have built them a long time ago. Not even all of math is obvious (the number zero was not “invented” till the 9th century as a mathematical concept).
You forgot 4) Decide that the new idea is wrong, by gum, and none of your pesky facts and evidence will sway me!
But you’re right that “obvious” is not a good way to describe what the OP is looking for. At best, “obvious” means “follows naturally and easily from the given facts”. And has been noted, things get a lot more obvious once you’ve gone through the effort and/or been subjected to the education to teach you how to deduce that result from those facts!
To be frank, evolution and the big bang are not “obvious”, and the latter is less obvious than the former. And while divine creation of the world and animals and stuff is obviously a mere myth, that’s a lot less obvious when your head has been pumped full of fairy stories, interfering with your logic.
Being able to actually prove that those arguments are true requires specialized knowledge that most of the readers of that book probably do not possess. And if you have to read a big tome most people have never heard of then it is NOT obvious.
I cannot unconsider pictures from space, it’s a pointless exercise.
What deliberate ignorance are you referring to? Do you think I don’t read people’s explanation of the Big Bang as I am reading this? Do you think I cannot understand the arguments people are putting forward? Not knowing a bit of useless science trivia that has no bearing on practical every day existence somehow reflect poorly on the choice of things I have elected to study? I am certain that I know things that you don’t know. Does that make you ignorant because you know different things that I don’t know?
Or are you just trying to make your contributions to the thread as void of content as the theories of what happened before the Big Bang?
It’s in the thread title. I am saying the Big Bang is not obvious, in answer to the OP.
No, a truth is not necessarily obvious.
The earth is a dinner plate, everybody knows that it only looks round if you look at it from directly above.
Also the pictures were photoshopped. In the sixties.
Or as we say in the Flat Earth Society
“There’s nothing to sphere but sphere itself.”
Obviousness does not imply you can or have proven something - otherwise nothing would be obvious to most people. And obvious things might be very difficult to prove.
it is obvious that light moves in a straight line (ignoring gravitational lensing) - understanding why this is so took Feynman years.
Do you think the earth being round was obvious to someone who lived before pictures from space? How about someone who didn’t live near a port and never saw the evidence of a mast appearing before the rest of a ship?
Ah, you mean 11.
I think that you avoid trying to find out the answers concerning the Big Bang, and that when the means to find these answers are handed to you on a silver platter, you refuse to expend any effort because you might learn something you have already determined you don’t want to learn. This is the deliberate ignorance I speak of-you could increase your knowledge base, but you refuse to do so.
As a big Terry Pratchett fan, I can state that the world is, sadly, an oblate spheroid.
As in three?
As in II. You know, IX from XI is II.
Yes, I am speaking literally. She’s had kids in her class (and remember, these are mostly 5 year olds) who, when asked what one plus one is, give her a totally blank look.
Not too many, thank goodness, but it happens.