Back to the serious

[caduceuskun]

There's the New York Times showing its damn liberal bias again. Article about the film Expelled, and about how several scientists, including PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins (you can find his website yourself, I'll bet) were interviewed under false pretenses (they believed they were being interviewed for a different movie called Crossroads, which

Comments

[izuko]

I think the term supernatural is a bit absurd, in the first place. If something we consider "supernatural" exists, then it must be natural. What is called supernatural falls into four categories

[caduceuskun]

String theory is probably one of the most widely accepted, or at least considered, theories trying for the unification of quantum theory and relativity theory, but it's hardly the only one, and there are lots of scientists who don't buy it, just like there are a lot who don't buy dark matter and dark energy, and even some who are dubious about the Big Bang theory as it's presently formulated. I've been reading a lot of articles about this stuff lately, though I don't have any of the links at the tips of my fingers at the moment. Basically like you're saying, predictability is one of the big things that makes a theory accepted, and one of the biggest problems with string theory, at least the last I heard, was that you can't really make any testable predictions using it; as opposed to quantum and relativity theory, the predictions of which are consistently are born out by experiments. They just don't work together right now, which is why things like ST exist. The arguments and discussions about advanced theoretical physics are a

[izuko]

I've seen many who treat String Theory like it's gospel. And, in fact, will look at you as if you had denied the existence of oxygen, were you to question it. Kind of like those of us who denied global warming were looked upon like ignorant buffoons, even a year ago (hell, even as recently as this summer, some global warming scientists and at least on politician recommended Nuremberg-style trials for us).

These days, many scientists seem to be distressingly wedded to their pet theories, for either financial or political reasons (or maybe just ego).

[caduceuskun]

Well, I haven't met any String Theorists who had that attitude, but I also haven't spent a lot of time around actual scientists since I graduated. I've certainly read articles recently that questioned the validity of string theory and proposed alternatives, there's at least one book, though I haven't read that, and I've seen more than one source claim that the majority of physicists admit there's not a lot of experimental verification that can be done with string theory. But, like I said before, scientists are humans too, and there are good financial and egotistical reasons to try and back up a theory even as it's starting to appear to be wrong. It's happened before, and I'm sure it will happen again.

[izuko]

But, like I said before, scientists are humans too, and there are good financial and egotistical reasons to try and back up a theory even as it's starting to appear to be wrong. It's happened before, and I'm sure it will happen again.

We're in agreement, then. The problem is that many think that "scientist" is a trump card. Like it implies infinite objectivity.

[caduceuskun]

Well, that's a concept that is perpetuated by a lot of different sides to any argument; in my reading about people who are distrustful toward science, I've come across people making the case that since one scientist was shown to be fallible, all scientists were inherently untrustworthy. Sort of like the "science has been wrong before" argument.