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Isn't this why some people were/are concerned about the Large Hadron Collider? I vaguely remember, before it was used for the first time, reading something about the fear that they might accidentally create a tiny black hole or something similar that would keep growing.
Very, very much. We theorize that the big bang that is said to have born the universe could have been from a concentrated release of energy no bigger than the instance of collided particles like the Hadron Collider. The scary part is, we really don't have all the variables, so using the collider is supposed to help to fill in some blanks, but some of the blanks are there because of the magnitude of energy explosion we need to observe to truly understand the potential.
It's almost like science is saying, "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you..."
I guess pushing the boundaries of knowledge IS scary at times!0 -
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Bizarre to think that it takes two years to reach Mars
Since both planets travel in elliptical orbits of differing period, and chemical rocket fuel is heavy and expensive to launch, practical efficiencies dictate that launches only occur at the times when fuel needs are lowest. Those intervals are about 18 months.1 -
JeromeBarry1 wrote: »Bizarre to think that it takes two years to reach Mars
Since both planets travel in elliptical orbits of differing period, and chemical rocket fuel is heavy and expensive to launch, practical efficiencies dictate that launches only occur at the times when fuel needs are lowest. Those intervals are about 18 months.
I still think that our first step to reaching other planets should be to build an orbital shipyard. (Or put one on the moon, I guess, but orbital might be better.) Without the huge mass of fuel needed to get a vehicle into space in the first place, the whole thing would be much more economical and probably safer.
(Edit: I found this article from 2009 that says the idea was under discussion... not sure if any further progress was made on it!)1 -
This image of Halley's Comet was taken in 1986. It's projected to return to Earth's vicinity in 2061.
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thisonetimeatthegym wrote: »GnothiSeauton23 wrote: »thisonetimeatthegym wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »thisonetimeatthegym wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »thisonetimeatthegym wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »thisonetimeatthegym wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »thisonetimeatthegym wrote: »They trust scientists and scientists tell them a fairy tale and the masses think it's facts.
I don't have a supercollider of my own, so I can't reproduce today's grand experiments and see if those physicists are pulling the wool over my eyes or not. Back in the day, 500 or 600 years ago, you could walk up the stairs and drop a stone and a piece of wood and see which one hit the ground first. But in today's world, all the long hanging fruit has already been picked. It's the really complex stuff that's left, which is harder for the public to verify or sometimes even understand.
I like reading about this stuff, though. And trying to understand it, as best I can.
I have a digital camera; most of you have seen some of my pictures. They're made of pixels. Well, there are actual pixels inside the camera - these are wells that capture photons and essentially count them. They're physically bigger than the wavelength of red light. My camera wouldn't work unless scientists were right about quantum mechanics. We think light acts as both a wave and a particle, we built very complex machinery around the smallest details of that assumption, and they work exactly the way they should. That's a shockingly powerful confirmation of the theory.
The physicists have a supercollider and they found out they pull the wool over their own eyes.
And some physicists are sick of moving the goalposts.
Can you give me some examples of what you mean?
Do you agree that things like digital cameras and computers are pretty solid confirmation of a lot of quantum mechanics?
"It is not an exaggeration to say that most of the world’s particle physicists believe that supersymmetry must be true—the theory is that compelling. These physicists’ long-term hope has been that the LHC would finally discover these superpartners, providing hard evidence that supersymmetry is a real description of the universe…
Indeed, results from the first run of the LHC have ruled out almost all the best-studied versions of supersymmetry. The negative results are beginning to produce if not a full-blown crisis in particle physics, then at least a widespread panic. "
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6836
They ran it again, to no avail. One physicists take on it:
Saturday, August 06, 2016
The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true.
Since I entered physics, I’ve seen grand unified models proposed and falsified. I’ve seen loads of dark matter candidates not being found, followed by a ritual parameter adjustment to explain the lack of detection. I’ve seen supersymmetric particles being “predicted” with constantly increasing masses, from some GeV to some 100 GeV to LHC energies of some TeV. And now that the LHC hasn’t seen any superpartners either, particle physicists are more than willing to once again move the goalposts.
During my professional career, all I have seen is failure. A failure of particle physicists to uncover a more powerful mathematical framework to improve upon the theories we already have. Yes, failure is part of science – it’s frustrating, but not worrisome. What worries me much more is our failure to learn from failure. Rather than trying something new, we’ve been trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
When I look at the data what I see is that our reliance on gauge-symmetry and the attempt at unification, the use of naturalness as guidance, and the trust in beauty and simplicity aren’t working. The cosmological constant isn’t natural. The Higgs mass isn’t natural. The standard model isn’t pretty, and the concordance model isn’t simple. Grand unification failed. It failed again. And yet we haven’t drawn any consequences from this: Particle physicists are still playing today by the same rules as in 1973.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-lhc-nightmare-scenario-has-come-true.html?m=1
Interesting. Sounds like we don't understand part of reality yet, we've come up with some theories to try to understand it, and none of them have been right yet. I don't see anything sinister in that.
So what do you think about digital cameras as confirmation that light acts as a particle and a wave? I mean one of the sentences you quoted as 'During my professional career, all I have seen is failure.' and in my life I feel the opposite.
I never said anything was sinister in that. What I am saying is that science is in a credibility crisis. This is not something I invented - this is what scientists themselves see as a problem.
That there are applied uses to science like your camera is a good thing. I wasn't discussing that. What I was discussing, specifically, was tge show Cosmos, and generally, the state of tge scientific institution. This is a pic from the science journal nature, on the state of their institution:
Do you think the crisis extends to all of science, or is it limited to cutting edge cosmology?
According to Nature magazine and scientific papers with titles like "Why most published research findings are false," science has concluded the problem is wide spread:
"The paper, which has become the most widely cited paper ever published in the journal PLoS Medicine, examined how issues currently ingrained in the scientific process combined with the way we currently interpret statistical significance, means that at present, most published findings are likely to be incorrect.
Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet recently put it only slightly more mildly: "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." Horton agrees with Ioannidis' reasoning, blaming: "small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance." Horton laments: "Science has taken a turn towards darkness."
http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/believe-it-or-not-most-published-research-findings-are-probably-false
I'd be interested to hear your actual opinion. All you ever do is copy and paste articles that fit your narrative. Almost everything you've posted in this thread has been a direct copy paste. For every article you find I can easily find others that refute it. Until you are capable of actually digging deeper and offering both perspectives your arguments will always be shallow.
It's called cutting to the chase.
I have an opinion. One that many will demand an outside source to validate my opinion.
I save us all time.
But since you asked:
For me, science is a tool to find out what God has made. If I say, the tool is flawed - it needs repair, I am just saying what the majority of scientists have determined about their own field. I am not anti science. To the contrary. I love it. What I hate is how science is used as a belief system by some.
I've dissected cats, put cells in a centrifuge, poured agar into petri dishes, spent more time than I liked looking into a microscope, wrote papers, sat in colloqia, organized colloquia, sat in on professor's faculty meetings.
And what I saw is that the human element in the sciences, and everything that goes with that element (love of money, fueds, ego, ambition, confirmation bias, politics, etc.) is represented very heavily in it. It can't be "trusted," or "believed in." It is a tool to be used. You may love a tool, but you cannot make a tool your lover or friend or god.
We are a tiny dot if seen in the midst of the millions in a city. Those millions in the city are seen from space as a tiny dot of light. If you look form a greater distance, this gorgeous planet we inhabit is seen as a dot of light among countless other dots of light.
Do you honestly expect science to explain the big truths of a universe we can barely see, when we have just this year noticed two additional body parts we overlooked all this time we've been studying the human body?
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So much of it is conjecture, speculation based on flimsy evidence, moving goalposts to call things proof that otherwise would not have been. The people who propose the ideas know it is speculative, but it gets written about in school textbooks as incontrovertible fact. It is not. Not remotely close.
The sciences are not supposed to require faith, but essentially it's been operating on it for a generation.
And they use it as a litmus test "do you believe in [any major unproved theory here - evolution, supersymmetry, abiogenesis, big bang, singularity] ?" And any response to the contrary leads to shock. Excuse me, the science I signed up for didn't require me to BELIEVE it. It required of itself to PROVE it to me. It has abandoned that standard a long time ago.
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Is that enough of my opinion for you, or would you like sources of where I got these ideas?
Thank you, @thisonetimeatthegym! Thank you for setting out your thoughts in such a clear way, and for providing the excerpts that you did, which were informative and eye-opening. Your analysis is rational and thoughtful, and you say what you think with directness and courage.
I'm new here and I love all the funny posts on MFP but this the best serious/analytical one I've seen so far. Bravo!0 -
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LOL and now it's gone but still a gorgeous pic!2 -
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