Bay 12 Games Forum

H-uh.  Sky's visibly brightening.  But I can clearly see the mostly-full moon to the... south, basically.
Still, it's almost 6AM.

Quote from: Reelya on May 19, 2016, 12:33:10 am

This is just blind ignorance right there.

The problem is that in most scientific experiments nothing is directly "observed". That has almost no meaning. We get data back, then we fit that data to a theory, and if the fit is approximately close enough within our error tolerance, we say the theory is proved. Clearly you could reject any evidence you want if you were critical enough with the error tolerance you'll accept, so there's a consensus on how close is close enough for a valid measurement.

And of course almost everything we're talking about as theories are only vague approximate models of reality. Our electron model is not an actual electron, it's just a hypothesized idea of an electron, which is probably way off what electrons actually are. Scientific data and theories only correlate with reality, they're not actual reality. "The map is not the territory".

I am still curious where you learned this, not being sarcastic, despite mainiac's insistence I haven't been trolling, though I do try to stay in character as my politician persona because I really want a hover platform, I'm genuinely asking who told you that was how science worked?

I even listed a couple of big examples that were in the news recently of observations or experiments which confirmed theoretical predictions. Relativity is another subject on which I am very well informed, and have known for the last, god, I guess it's closer to 30 years now, that gravitational waves had not been observed. I also knew the Higgs was a missing piece, I'm STILL angry about the Superconducting Super Collider being cancelled.

You ask most people a few years ago, they would be surprised if you told them there was any doubt about the shit Einstein worked on, or about something so well tested we call it the Standard Model, capital letters and all!

Quote from: mainiac on May 18, 2016, 09:01:45 pm

The problem with the first graph is that humans aren't programmed to see a thin vertical line (right at the end) and think "holy shit!"  It takes years of rigorous training to make people crap their pants if they see that.

Really?... because I have no such training, and it's the most obvious thing on the graph to me.