Genuine Scientific Mystery - The Pioneer Anomaly and Dark Matter / Energy

[tongodeon]

I've occasionally heard scientists criticized for not appreciating mystery. "Scientists want to take apart something that seems unusual or counterintuitive. They want to explain and measure and figure it out. They don't appreciate mystery in the world. They can't accept things they can't explain or don't know

Comments

[tongodeon]

it occurs to me that, for it to make sense for you to post this here, there must be people reading your journal who are not members of "the choir" as you and I would define it. Do we think that's true?

I don't know anyone for which this entire post would be new information, but I know a few people who I thought would benefit from reading this.

Woo practitioners have gotten good enough at appropriating the vocabulary of science to describe nonscientific things that the line has gotten blurred. I wanted to spell out a reasonably clear example of how to know whether you're dealing with a genuine scientific mystery as opposed to theories that can't be tested because their conditions aren't reproducible or we lack sufficient evidence.

Some of my friends also seem to misunderstand many things about science and scientists, most notably professional practices, motivations, acceptable standards of evidence, and the nature of professional enjoyment.

I'm also laying the groundwork for at least two posts that I've got in the works. One is about genetically modified food; there's a lot of alarmism and fearmongering in that area centered around the mystery of "what might happen" and I wanted to lay some groundwork about the difference between vague and unprovable unknown-unknowns like "we don't know what a GM peanut might do" with specific and provable known-unknowns like "we don't know what dark matter is comprised of".

I'm also just writing this down now so that I can refer people to my written record later. And because kraquehaus has been bugging me to write something about the pioneer anomaly ever since I got giddy about it during dinner a few weeks ago.