Disturbing Scientific Discoveries

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/93785079.html

by bootload • 16 years ago

50 50 16 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

It's the comments I find the most disturbing about that article.

zackattack• 16 years ago

please elaborate?

kdeberk2• 16 years ago

Some of the first few comments are from evolution-denialists and climate-gaters. However, I have to agree with the point that the article places the church in a bad daylight for the first item. Galileo wasn't refused because what he said was against scripture (was it even?). The main argument from the church was that his theory was methodologically flawed.

First there was no good reason to assume that telescopes provided a good image of distant bodies, so observations made using them had no credibility and could thus not be counted as 'evidence' as the article states. Secondly, if the earth moved and we with it, why did an object that was dropped from a tower, land at the bottom of that tower and not a good distant away from it? Assuming that the earth and the tower moved with it, but not the object since it was touching the earth nor the tower.

Galileo had a lot of explaining to do: the observations he made simply could not be placed in the prevalent scientific model. The easy way out is was to refute the evidence because it did not fit, the long way out was to rebuild the model.

dazzawazza• 16 years ago

thanks for the tip. reading those comments has further undermined my belief that there is intelligent life in this corner of the universe!

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

There is.

It's just more rare than previously thought.

shrikant• 16 years ago

From one of those comments:

I'm still a teenager, so I've got plenty of time. Who am I to say it's wrong or right? For the most part I believe everything here, but that's because of what I see with the media and everything. This is good. :)

No you whipper-snapper, it's not good.

Sweeping generalisation: I weep for the teenager of today.

jacquesm7• 16 years ago

Give it 20 years, they'll come around to your point of view eventually.

At least they're interested, that's a beginning.

Apathy is a much bigger problem than being still an uncritical consumer.

I remember the first time I had first hand knowledge of an event that was covered by the media, and how much my personal, eye-witness experience deviated from what I read in the newspaper and saw on TV the next day.

It was a moment of absolute amazement, and then I suddenly realized I'd probably been duped to a greater or lesser extent for years about any number of things.

zokier2• 16 years ago

"c², or the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) times itself, which equals 34,700,983,524."

Does that number actually tell anyone anything?

brazzy4• 16 years ago

It tells people that (because it's such a huge number) "a little" mass contains "a lot" of energy. The actual number and unit isn't really important to get that point across.

lutorm• 16 years ago

Any number can be huge if you put it in suitable units. Without units, the number is meaningless.

zokier2• 16 years ago

The point was that as mph is quite arbitrary unit it is practically impossible to see the amount of energy. If the speed of light was given in m/s then the amount of energy would have been easy to see. ie E = mc². c = 300 × 10^6 m/s, c² = 9 × 10^16 (m/s)², so with that equation 1kg of mass actually contains approximately 9 × 10^16 joules of energy which is a lot.

What would the equivalent thought process be in imperial units? Lets say you have 1 lb of mass and want to figure out the amount of energy contained in it with the equation E = mc² and c² being 3.47 × 10^10 miles per second, just to know the scale of things (which was kinda the point in the article imho). How would you do that?

edit: Another point of view: velocity and kinetic energy. E = 0.5mv², that should be familiar to anyone familiar to physics. So with a velocity of 5.5 × 10^9 inches per year you don't need a lot of mass to have a lot of energy, because the multiplier is so huge, right?

billpg• 16 years ago

If we used Plank units, the speed of light is 1, so c² has the slightly less impressive value of... 1.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

Maybe it's just too early in the morning, but does that still work out and accurately express reality? That implies e = mc^2 = mc = m

daniel-cussen3• 16 years ago

I remember Keats and the whole truth is beauty, beauty truth thing. I feel like it's actually, truth is ugly, always. I mean, have you ever found out the truth and not been disappointed?

samdk• 16 years ago

All of the time. The universe is pretty incredible. The stories we make up about it don't come close.

Douglas Adams said it better than I can: "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."

clay• 16 years ago

Have you ever proved a mathematical theorem on your own?

daniel-cussen3• 16 years ago

Yes; that's actually a pretty good counterpoint. But what about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem? That is a mindbreaker.

j_baker• 16 years ago

A bit of a correction: dark matter isn't "exotic". It's the most common form of matter there is.

axiom• 16 years ago

Personally I find Godel incompleteness to be a far more disturbing discovery than any of the things listed in the article. Something about a fundamental limitation on deductive systems just scares the hell out of me.

Avshalom• 16 years ago

The idea that there is a fundamental limit to how far you can get when starting from something declared true by fiat has always struck me as kind of obvious. Though that's probably at least partly because I grew up well after the invention of science and the work of people like Godel.

dmoney2• 16 years ago

Godel's theorem implies that in a consistent system there are unprovable truths. I've always wondered if those truths could be things no one would care about anyway. Are statements like "this statement is unprovable" useful for anything other than proving the Incompleteness theorem?

dgordon• 16 years ago

The halting problem seems kind of important. Also, at least two of Hilbert's problems -- the continuum hypothesis and solving general Diophantine equations -- turned out to be undecidable (the latter because it reduces to the halting problem.)

Edit: Er, actually, the Diophantine equation question would be uncomputable (like the halting problem), not undecidable. The ideas are closely related, though.

terrble• 16 years ago

This article is going to sound really silly when archaeologists dust off the bits in 500 years.

waratuman2• 16 years ago

Some of these aren't even scientific discoveries:

- We’ve already changed the climate for the rest of this century - There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we’re probably in one now.

Seriously?

brazzy4• 16 years ago

Yes, seriously. Realize that most of the doubt about climate change is engineered by astroturfing campaigns and financed by oil companies.

Among the actual scientists, the overwhelming consensus is that climate change is happening on a scale that is threatening, and to a significant extent caused by humans.

waratuman2• 16 years ago

That is great! But the point is that this a prediction into the future and is not a fact. A fact is something that you can prove, and you can not prove the future. If you can, come talk to me we can start a business :)

psyklic• 16 years ago

It isn't that WE are becoming extinct. The mass extinction is of other species due to us.

angstrom• 16 years ago

We are the extinction-level event, but many people don't grasp that. Society is what's at stake. Humans can migrate and adapt as they have in the past.

arethuza• 16 years ago

If anyone finds that list disturbing then they really need to get out more.

Personally, I find what people capable of in our darker moments disturbing, but science is essentially the antidote for that. Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" being strongly recommended:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

malkia• 16 years ago

At least bacon is good :)

Disturbing Scientific Discoveries

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