I remember trying to explain cell biology to my aunt. She’s not a dummy, but had no scientific training at all, high school education. She felt comfortable with the idea that if you could see something under a light microscope, then it was valid. But her perception seemed to be that for everything else, scientists basically just guess. I think that this kind of belief is widespread. Science journalism doesn’t help with the weekly headlines “Scientists discover Darwin/Einstein was wrong after all…”
Nice quote. Wrong attribution. 
Huh, weird. I don’t know how that happened. Apologies to both parties. Should I report myself?
ETA: I guess I had an old multiquote lingering above, and didn’t pay attention when I edited down your post.
[Moderating]
I fixed the quote.
[Not moderating]
I think part of what happens is that people put too much weight on scienceism and not enough on science itself. To too many people, what a scientist does is Science!, and how a scientist knows things is through Science!, with no details given. But the details are everything, here: The way a scientist knows things is by designing and performing experiments, and carefully recording and statistically analyzing the results of those experiments. Or at the least, reading accounts from others who have done so, with the possibility of redoing them themselves. We really need more people (by which I mean everyone, not just professional scientists) actually doing science, not just talking about it, and certainly not just using the word without knowing what it means.
What is more impressive than measuring the wind speeds of the planet next door is measuring them for a planet 63 light-years from here.
Yes, this. And, sadly, the more sophisticated the results from our science, the less people are easily able to understand them, which, I fear, reduces interest in trying to understand them (or at least, that was my experience while teaching high school students). When I was a teen (in the 70s), I could understand much of what was put in Scientific American, even if I didn’t get all the nuances. Now, that magazine often baffles me, and it’s hardly full of sophisticated explanations. Science magazine truly challenges me each week. 
To be fair, I suspect that at least some of that is a decline in the quality of Scientific American. I don’t know how it is now, but I gave up on it about a decade ago. I’m not sure what the best popular magazine is now for science… Maybe Science News?
I kinda feel the need to mention that I don’t believe in magic. That, and I understand what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. It’s more than “drop a beer can down there” but that exaggeration made my point; I wanted to know how we clocked particle motion within the fluid. I wanted to hear how they tagged a particle and followed its progress over time. All the spectral and seismic data would still have me questioning this issue (until I understood it) but the landing and direct measurement have (mostly) closed the book my *Venal *query. We could move the discussion on to Titan or the exoplanet HD 189733b that **Darren **mentions.
In fact, the exoplanet article says:
I would want to argue that having that one piece of datum (or many points of the same data) does little to draw a conclusion. Sure, it may seem that they’re seeing a Doppler shift and they can assume it’s a valid way to measure the “wind”, but without a second approach/study that reaches the same conclusion, I’m not buying it just yet.
I don’t know what you mean by “seismic data.” But I’m curious to know why you think a spectroscopic measurement is any less reliable than an in-situ measurement. A velocity measurement doesn’t get any more “direct” than a Doppler measurement of characteristic spectral lines.
Since I’m the guy who inserted the word “magic” into the thread I wanted to make sure you weren’t pissed at me for insulting you. Which wasn’t my intent. My apologies if I did a crappy job of making that clear.
The point of Clarke’s saying is that anything someone doesn’t understand pretty thoroughly has to be taken on at least some faith. e.g. to someone who’s never heard of Doppler shift nor of spectral emission lines, the idea we can use them together to reliably measure the speed of a distant moving gas is incomprehensible.
That person either must take somebody else’s word for it or else do a lot of research to build up a solid basis of knowledge with no “leaps of faith” somewhere along the way. Most folks won’t do that much research. So they either accept the word of others or they don’t. IOW, the measurement comes out of a black box that either works by (what amounts to) magic or else that’s simply fraud (or guesswork) depending on that particular someone’s POV.
I also said that once somebody pointed out some more details of the Venusian / Veneran measurements you readily recognized their validity. Which is the sure sign of somebody who gets it. There’s vast tracts of science I don’t know, even within areas that interest me. But I know to mostly accept things that don’t run directly counter to what little I do know. And to explore those remaining discrepancies until I resolve them.
The problem is the rest of humanity. The ones who say “I don’t get it, so I don’t believe it. And that settles it.” They operate on faith, but using a very different metric for which sources of info and insight are trustworthy and which are not. As science advances, the “I don’t get it” group will necessarily grow ever larger even with good universal education. So we as society need to work on the “… so I don’t believe it. And that settles it.” part of their attitude. Knowledge and attitude are two very different things.
You served, briefly, as a “lite” version of a poster child for that POV. Who promptly demonstrated he was “cured”, or more like never had the disease in the first place.
Again sorry to offend if I did.
See, this is what baffles the rest of us. The spectral and seismic data are the good measurements. Dropping the beer can is what can lead to poor results. The former are widespread measurements of huge amounts of the surface. The latter is localized and subject to any number of possible confounding events.
Your understanding of what’s good is exactly backward. Maybe while you’re thinking about these results you can take a look at where this odd notion came from and see if you can rid yourself of it.
That all is mostly irrelevant to your other point, which is sound. Of course scientists never consider anything to be settled unless they have at least two independent ways of providing data that supports the same conclusion. Even then they leave their minds open to the possibility that a third test will cause them to rethink the issue. However, real-world science had to proceed on something and provisional conclusions based on single types of good measurements happen all the time. Do some of them get modified over time? Certainly. Scientists expect that. It’s no big deal, however crazy laymen go over it.
Not offended at all, LSLGuy. I shouldn’t have singled-out your *magic *comment, either. I’m tough… you guys can hit me with what you’ve got, ha! I actually do get what y’all are trying to say and **LSLGuy **did a good job of explaining. I didn’t want to come across as a luddite, or a warrior against science. I’m just being critical of what I’ve been told and what I think I understand. I appreciate being taken to task on this.