12th September 2004, 2:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 12th September 2004, 11:35 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
Well, actually I had assumed everyone here agreed with me. When it comes to science, most people here share the same opinions on a lot of it, so I thought this would be yet another thing we all agreed on. I had originally predicted we'd all have a fun time of it bashing quack doctors or something....
But anyway, what I meant there was the ad hominum. That stuff is bad.
But hey, here's what's important, OB1 doesn't care. At least when I talked to him in IM, he said he wasn't even offended by the whole thing.
Therefor, back on topic.
I just wanted to add something about the whole idea that everyone has thought they were right in the past but were wrong.
That's about right, but the devil's in the details. In the fairly distant past, no one was using the scientific method. Aristotle thought things fell down because they longed to be united with the Earth, and he didn't have a single bit of evidence at all to support it, just his own philosophizing (philosophy basically being a fancy way to say "day dreaming"). So, the fact that they were wrong but thought they were right has no bearing on the validity of the scientific method. When you get to Galileo fighting against the establishment, well, he WAS the scientific method, in it's earliest form, and he wasn't fighting against anything resembling the current scientific community. It would be more apt to say ol' Gal was the scientific community fighting against the establishment which represents pseudoscientists. Newton was actually ACCEPTED when he presented his findings, once proven, and rather willingly, thanks to Galileo's work. There was no "fighting the grand fight" there, except his own personal struggle to actually formulate the first complete set of laws of motion. Einstein, now he actually had a battle ahead of him. The scientific community had gotten a bit stagnant, but that was them drifting away from science. However, in defence, Einstein DID have a lot of evidence to show, and rightfully so, and many times he just didn't have it, and the holes were all legitimate when nay-sayers pointed it out. Anyway, today if there's enough evidence to back up a claim, the scientific community in general won't stubbornly refuse it. My main point in this very rough and brief history was just to say the whole idea that "every great thinker in the past had to struggle agains the rest of the world thinking they were wrong and laughing at them" is misleading, and wrong (namely in the "every" part of it, and laughter wasn't really a part of it, ever).
But anyway, what I meant there was the ad hominum. That stuff is bad.
But hey, here's what's important, OB1 doesn't care. At least when I talked to him in IM, he said he wasn't even offended by the whole thing.
Therefor, back on topic.
I just wanted to add something about the whole idea that everyone has thought they were right in the past but were wrong.
That's about right, but the devil's in the details. In the fairly distant past, no one was using the scientific method. Aristotle thought things fell down because they longed to be united with the Earth, and he didn't have a single bit of evidence at all to support it, just his own philosophizing (philosophy basically being a fancy way to say "day dreaming"). So, the fact that they were wrong but thought they were right has no bearing on the validity of the scientific method. When you get to Galileo fighting against the establishment, well, he WAS the scientific method, in it's earliest form, and he wasn't fighting against anything resembling the current scientific community. It would be more apt to say ol' Gal was the scientific community fighting against the establishment which represents pseudoscientists. Newton was actually ACCEPTED when he presented his findings, once proven, and rather willingly, thanks to Galileo's work. There was no "fighting the grand fight" there, except his own personal struggle to actually formulate the first complete set of laws of motion. Einstein, now he actually had a battle ahead of him. The scientific community had gotten a bit stagnant, but that was them drifting away from science. However, in defence, Einstein DID have a lot of evidence to show, and rightfully so, and many times he just didn't have it, and the holes were all legitimate when nay-sayers pointed it out. Anyway, today if there's enough evidence to back up a claim, the scientific community in general won't stubbornly refuse it. My main point in this very rough and brief history was just to say the whole idea that "every great thinker in the past had to struggle agains the rest of the world thinking they were wrong and laughing at them" is misleading, and wrong (namely in the "every" part of it, and laughter wasn't really a part of it, ever).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)