I will attempt your last question for now. I mean we can imagine things that affect us in a very real way, whether or not the thing we imagine is actually real. Take anxiety, for example. We can describe anxiety in physiological terms, such as increased heart rate and blood pressure, insomnia, obsessing over something. But the actual cause of anxiety can vary greatly from individual to individual, and what doesn’t bother one person can send another to the hospital. When dealing with mental illnesses, it’s tricky to look at from a strictly scientific point of view, since much of the experience is subjective to the individual experiencing it. For example, we know lithium is an effective treatment for many who suffer from bipolar disorder, but after fifty years, we’re still not really sure why. But if it works, we use it.
That’s what I mean. The repeatable part of the experiment is scientific, and the pinpointing of a particular medication to help is as well, but the array of symptoms, the diagnosis, usually part of the imagination or a projection from current circumstances, is at least partly guess work, which is why there so many variations in the DSM-V manual.
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Hmmm. I have discovered a solution to help solve Sudoku puzzles by looking for a particular pattern in number combinations, and it works every single time, but try as I might, I have never seen it written about anywhere. I have no reason to believe that I am unique in this discovery, but in the other hand, I have not seen any evidence that this possibility, though implausible, may actually be true. Does that make me a genius? Hardly. But it is my secret winning strategy for now unless someone demonstrates otherwise.
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Before we argue whether the laws of physics apply to hovering purple dragons, you need to demonstrate that there are hovering purple dragons. The laws of physics do not apply to things people make up or hallucinate. Have any supernatural phenomena that need explaining? That reliably show up, I mean.
Have you researched all the strategies? Perhaps your is a remapping of one that has already been published. My solving strategies come up with various search space algorithms I’ve worked on, and probably look different from what has been published but are actually very similar.
I don’t know. My strategy involves pairs or sometimes trios of numbers that always appear together in adjacent 3x3 columns or rows. Haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, but I’m sure SOMEBODY must have also discovered it. All I know is that it is reliable 100% of the time. Lucky me.
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Your self directed focus of learning will be inevitably on what appeals to you and you will disproportionately disregard information that disagrees with conclusions you have already drawn. Education is about challenging your thinking process, not necessarily challenging your retention of facts.
Dark matter can’t be observed … it doesn’t fit into our current Standard Model … can’t be produced in the lab … seems that it doesn’t obey the laws of nature as we currently understand them … and there’s no experiment we could conduct to disprove it’s existence …
Yet, just about everyone here has faith that it does exist …
@ Biffster … Suduko puzzles are a subset of magic squares, or Latin squares. Leonhard Euler did some pioneering work in this field so that might be the direction to your research.
Thanks for the tip…and the observation about dark matter. If it weren’t for our imaginations, we wouldn’t have any scientific theories at all.
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“Dark matter” is placeholder name a type of matter which is inferred from orbital discrepancies of visible matter on galactic scales and gravitational lensing of distant light.
The "darK’ aspect speaks to its apparent weak (or nonexistent) interaction with the electromagnetic force. It **does **interact with the gravitational force - hence how its existence was inferred. For the record, neutrinos also interact weakly with the electromagnetic - doing so is not magically.
A) It has some demonstrable, repeatable effect on the natural world. Then we can measure that effect and attempt to attribute causation.
B) It does not. Then it is indistinguishable from something that simply does not exist.
This is just nonsense. The hypothesized existence of dark matter is based on evidence, not faith, or it wouldn’t be science. And it’s based on evidence that requires its existence in order to conform with the laws of nature, such as the gravitational effects observed in galaxies and other empirical evidence. Read what I said here: “The natural world is everything that we can observe directly and directly, and everything that we can infer or hypothesize from natural laws and from abstract mathematics, right out to the limits of the observable universe and multiverses beyond, right down to the beginning of the Big Bang and the interiors of black holes.”
Dark matter is a perfectly natural hypothetical matter that is presently at the limits of scientific understanding. It’s not magic, it’s not supernatural, and it’s not God.
I’m well aware of how dark matter is inferred and that it’s based on our current understanding of gravity. We can either create this magical substance so our faith in gravity remains unchanged, or we can question our current understanding of gravity. With science, it is acceptable to investigate both these options. My point is that in science there is such a thing as conjecture, and this is an important tool for our scientific exploration.
The ancients had a “placeholder” name for why storms would sweep in from the sea, they called it the anger of Poseidon. Today we know different, perhaps in 2,000 years we’ll think of the natural world in terms of Universal Field Theory giggling how anybody could possibly think gravity was anything but imagination.
Personally, I see a fairly big difference between “Hmm, these are some strange results to these tests, perhaps there is a something-which-causes-these-strange-reactions, or perhaps our understanding is wrong” and “Hmm, there are large storms sweeping in from the sea, there must be an incredibly powerful demiurge out there who controls it all, and occasionally has sex with humans and also animals and creates heroic figures and monsters, and he’s pissed at us and we should go sacrifice something to him to get this to stop. Also; beard.”
Don’t ask us, ask those on the cutting edge of theoretical physics and cosmology.
They’ll have multiple ideas about the nature of dark matter/dark energy and the potential experiments and observations that will lead to the discarding and/or modification and refinement of theories. Science works by trying to prove yourself wrong. By clearing up what it isn’t they’ll get closer to what it is.
But you miss the point. Ask them if it will be possible one day to design such experiments and they’ll say yes. Or at least they will strive to put themselves in such a position. They would love to find a way to shatter such a concept. That is a first class ticket to Oslo.
Ask the major religions if there is any evidence that would disprove their gods…they will answer no, and they aren’t even trying to find any.
Hey, if you guys want to test out prayer, and make believers out of us atheists, just have god regrow an amputee’s limb. Of all the sick, cancerous, disease-ridden people he’s healed in the past, apparently amputee’s piss him off so much he’s never bothered to heal one in the history of mankind.