Enmos
Valued Senior Member
I edited..
Unproven for lack of evidence. Atheism/Theism
- Thread starter Mr. Hamtastic
- Start date
I edited..
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
That's why theories sometimes get revised or updated.
If you have a better system you like propose I'd love to hear it..
But theories are usually vigorously and thoroughly tested for all imaginable circumstances.
Here's are some tests to see if your pinky still exists. Look at it. Is it still there? Have everyone else look at it to see if it's still there. Have a doctor examine the pinky to see if exists, and if so, why it's numb.
Don't try this, but you could try cutting with a sharp knife, the area in which the pinky should be on your hand.
Have any of these tests failed yet?
I don't which is why I never claim that science gives proof or evidence. It doesn't. It merely describes our observations to the limits of our ignorance. A pipette thats off by 0.1 ml consistently could make your experiment one that can't be replicated. How would you know?
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
If science doesn't give evidence how do you do you job ? lol
Also, if you really mean what you say, it means you do your job on faith alone.
Infallibility is a necessary property of explanation ? C'mon, SAM - If you have to deal in that level of foolishness, time to reconsider your approach. Pretty soon you're going to be requiring infallibility for evidence - - - too late:SAM said:
Apparently argument and reason are not part of science ?SAM said:
btw: If science does not provide evidence, explanation, etc, does anything else ? Or do explanation and evidence not exist in the world of physical investigation ?
While a scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable there is a bit more to it than that. The hypothesis must make independent predictions which can then shown to be true or false. One does not merely presume truth upon the absence of falsification.
For example, I might hypothesize a theory of gravity which is identical to the current scientific theory of gravity except that the cause of gravity is my will, and that the mass of an object is only a factor because I decided so. In this case all experimental data will be the same as what is normally found, no data will contradict my hypothesis. But we cannot prove my hypothesis from this, as I have made and tested no independent predictions.
However, let's make one. I predict, since gravity is determined by my will, that I can change the fundamentals of gravity. If I so decide I can choose to have gravity function on the basis on an objects color, rather than it's mass. The higher the object's wavelength of color the less gravity it will have, the lower the wavelength it will have more gravity. Now we have a testable hypothesis.
~Raithere
You have faith. Of course. In several things. And you do things to maintain that faith.
Primarily in your ability to do the experiment. Can you pipette 0.01 ml within 2SD? Is your coefficient of variation less than 5% for duplicates? Do you check your instruments regularly? Does it matter that the cooling system was on the blink? Did you treat all the samples in the same way? Is everyone who is working on the samples following the same protocols? Did you reduce all likelihood of contamination? etc. Ultimately, you do what you can, but if you want to believe in your results, you have to have faith that what you did was sufficient to ensure that your results reflect what you intended to measure and nothing else. It could still be complete gibberish of course, but until there is evidence pointing to that, you have to believe that what you did is right.
Define gravity.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
:bugeye: lol
Ok so
Observation:My pinky finger on my left hand is numb
Hypothesis: My pinky finger on my left hand does not exist
Test: Can I see my pinky finger? I will try this 5 times.
On my desk-yes. in my ear-no behind my head-no while sitting on my hand-no with my hand as a fist, thumb up-no
result-It is probability 80% my pinky finger on my left hand does not exist
NOTE: I did this before doing the sharp knife test.
Observation:My pinky finger on my left hand is numb
Hypothesis: My pinky finger on my left hand does not exist
Test: Can I see my pinky finger? I will try this 5 times.
On my desk-yes. in my ear-no behind my head-no while sitting on my hand-no with my hand as a fist, thumb up-no
result-It is probability 80% my pinky finger on my left hand does not exist
NOTE: I did this before doing the sharp knife test.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
And thats all the mechanical stuff which you can control. What if your experimental design is crappy, you're not measuring what you think you're measuring because you optimised a protocol based on limited information that was false? What if someone left your samples out overnight and destroyed them, but was afraid to tell you and you're just wasting your time because all your experiments are based on aliquots from those samples? The shit that goes down in labs is so incredible, its a wonder people ever arrive at any conclusions. I know someone who got her PhD on a project and one year later a student realised that she used the wrong xxx for her studies. She just did not know it. But its out there, where someone else believes it works.:shrug:
There's a good troll.
How's the quoting thing coming along ?
I can do this, but I can't seperate the quotes into selected bits.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Ok, show us your test results and testing conditions so we can replicated the results.
Here is my protocol, minus all the secret stuff I don't want to tell you or just can't be bothered writing down..
Ever try to replicate a protocol from a journal? Gah.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Here is my protocol, minus all the secret stuff I don't want to tell you.
What, the "
" ? Ok..