Science making it up

faceman

Science is great, yay! Look at us with our iPhones and nuclear power.

But science hasn't always got it right. The world was once flat. Dogs were pack animals. Lightning doesn't strike twice.

All turned out to be bollocks.

So it's probably fair to say science believes things today that will be proven as nonsense in the decades to come.

For example. Ursula and Sabina Eriksson, the two crazy Swedish ladies who tried to kill themselves in a fit of rage on the M6 motorway in the UK in bizarre circumstances. Science explained their actions as 'folie a deux', otherwise known as 'shared psychosis'. (Where delusionary beliefs get transmitted to other people.)

I'm pretty sure this will be debunked in the years to come.

What other science stuff do we believe nowadays that you're pretty confident is nonsense?

L.Jenkins

Whether it be fact or not, I'm sure Science has always regarded even theory with a degree of scepticism. I always though that belief in a flat earth was nothing more than mass delusion as opposed to Science as a whole, getting it wrong.

El Weirdo

faceman wrote: »

What other science stuff do we believe nowadays that you're pretty confident is nonsense?

The internet.

steddyeddy

Science isn't a belief system. It's a method.

Trent Houseboat

The fact that "science" is willing to change it's mind and admit that it was wrong is it's greatest strength.

Saipanne

If science was right about everything it would cease to exist.

The Backwards Man

Science isn't infallible, no matter what scientists would have you believe. They don't have any more answers than the rest of the us, they just spend longer looking at the questions.

osarusan

faceman wrote: »

So it's probably fair to say science believes things today that will be proven as nonsense in the decades to come.

It is, but it will be proven to be nonsense by scientific method.

Most of the time, scientific belief is an honest interpretation based on the most up-to-date and compelling evidence. That's not always the right interpretation, but as long as it's revisiting itself and taking new information into account, it will correct itself.

Trent Houseboat wrote: »

The fact that "science" is willing to change it's mind and admit that it was wrong is it's greatest strength.

Exactly.

The Backwards Man

steddyeddy wrote: »

Science isn't a belief system. It's a method.

Until you tell a scientist they're wrong. . .

kjl

I think we have a pretty good grasp of the cosmos. I do think we are still holding out for a unifying theory which explains why certain behaviors that exist in at the sub atomic level.

They said the earth was flat and the earth was at the center of the universe but this was a belief based on ignorance, not science. Science corrected the ignorance.

I think that people are really stupid when it comes to science and the scientific method. They ignore very clear evidence and go on gut feeling. This can be scene clearly with climate change and man's involvement.

Another example of this was Clair Cameron Patterson, who was the first person to actually used uranium–lead dating to accurately predict the age of the earth; he also discovered that the mankind was polluting the environment with lead through the use of leaded fuel which was killing people; it wasn't till 30 years later people started to listen.

So you can talk about how science is wrong and will be proven wrong in the future, but you need to appreciate that science as it is today it very convincing in our understanding of the universe.

Shint0

It's because there are actually very few light bulb moments. You have to understand how knowledge is accumulated and acquired. Theories and methods are tried and tested, some discarded, someone else comes along, builds on that, refines it and tweaks it even further or completely disproves it. There are very few totally original thoughts and discoveries. That's generally how it works.

marcbrophy

Saying that people thought the earth was flat in the past, is a form of human hubris, that has no basis in reality.

We like to think that we are better than the generation who came before us. That we are the pinnacle of the intelligence that we hold. The fact is, that we are as clever now as we were 2000 years ago.

NiallBoo

You'd have to wonder...

If people didn't bullishly misinterpret simple ideas...would After Hours even exist?

bazza1

Whaaaaat? The Earth is NOT flat????? Whoooooaaaaa!!!1

GLaDOS

Being incorrect is very different to making it up.

NiallBoo

bazza1 wrote: »

Whaaaaat? The Earth is NOT flat????? Whoooooaaaaa!!!1

Westmeath is flat, that's close enough

Agricola

The Backwards Man wrote: »

Until you tell a scientist they're wrong. . .

The scientist will accept they're wrong, if you can prove them wrong!

Alf Stewart.

One in the bum, no harm done.

That myths been debunked multiple times.

osarusan

faceman wrote: »

What other science stuff do we believe nowadays that you're pretty confident is nonsense?

If your hand is bigger than your face you've got cancer.

I remain sceptical.

endacl

Repeat after me, OP.

"Science is a method, not a subject".

Here's a peer review for you. Your premise is flawed, leading to a a flawed hypothesis. Conclusions drawn from a flawed hypothesis may be safely disregarded.

bazza1

NiallBoo wrote: »

Westmeath is flat, that's close enough

You are having a laugh at my expense....Westmeath is not a real place!

syklops

I'm very curious to see how climate change / global warming will be looked back on in years to come. Being a climate change skeptic today makes you worse in many peoples eyes than a flat-earther or a Creationist. I wonder how that will pan out.

Wibbs

kjl wrote: »

I think we have a pretty good grasp of the cosmos.

IMH I'm really not sure that we do. Dark matter and energy look like real fudges with the numbers because the data gathered didn't match up with the theories. Akin to kids learning maths; if jane has one apple in one hand and two apples in the other, how many apples does Jane have? With dark matter theory the answer would be ten, because seven of them are invisible apples.

Inflation is another "eh wut?" theory IMH. Sure it's elegant as a solution, to a potential underlying problem in the theoretical early universe. Just because the maths work doesn't mean reality does. Actually the latter is again IMH a major problem with cosmology and physics.

As for the flat earth stuff, from very early on in civilisation man realised the Earth wasn't flat. Hell a few measured the size of it using the length of shadows from gnomons set ten miles apart. The Greeks were beginning to muse about the Earth not being centre too. Indeed Columbus went sailing precisely because they knew the Earth was a globe and he hoped to find a shorter route to China and the Indies.

I suspect we have a very long way to go with regard to genetic research and how genes actually work over time and lifetimes. The story of human evolution will continue to be rewritten and with a few more shocks in store I'll bet.

Oh and that there is an awful lot of well dodgy "science" about these days and it's not being sufficiently tackled.

Dohnjoe

The Backwards Man wrote: »

Until you tell a scientist they're wrong. . .

Scientists prove other scientists are incorrect all the time. Peer review, consensus, stronger theories - it's how we figure stuff out

Again, science is a method, not a belief

The only alternative to science is "making things up", which humans have been doing for millennia. However progress has meant we can actually measure and calculate things instead of making populist guesses

It's one of the main reasons we are debating this on computerized devices over the internet, rather than scrabbling around in the mud

Your Face

I wonder how many hypotheses are taken as theories.

Junkyard Tom

Science has a long way to go before it catches up with common sense.

gramar

NiallBoo wrote: »

Westmeath is flat, that's close enough

It can't be all flat. Isn't here a place where water flows uphill there?
Take that, science.

nozzferrahhtoo

faceman wrote: »

But science hasn't always got it right.

Could you be specific as to when "science" made claims such as "The world is flat"?.

Secondly science does not get anything wrong. It is a methodology, a tool. It is the people using it that get it wrong. If your cake comes out of the oven a mess then "Baking ruined my cake" is not accurate. YOU tried and failedc to use the methodologies of baking and YOU ruined the cake.

Similarly when someone tries to apply the methodologies of science, and makes errors, then THEY messed up. Not science.

faceman wrote: »

So it's probably fair to say science believes things today that will be proven as nonsense in the decades to come.

Not really. A lot of the places science changes position are at the fringes, where the things it is changing position on were never really strongly confirmed in the first place.

But our core "Theories" are so well established that it is ludicrous to be too expectant of change except on the fringes. Evolution for example is as much a "fact" as anything in science is and there is no reason at all to expect falsification of it in the future.

But our ideas on the fringes of that domain, about the mechanisms about how Evolution did what it did, are indeed in some level of flux and change, and get debated all the time. Often quite heated too alas.

faceman wrote: »

What other science stuff do we believe nowadays that you're pretty confident is nonsense?

I would say the efficacy, or indeed lack of efficacy, of many medical and psychological treatments will be retrospectively deemed to be nonsense in the future.

The main reasons being that publishing bias, confirmation bias, result bias, and lack of replication studies all mean that the data set upon which we base our current opinions on the efficacy of these things is..... well calling it flawed would be to FLATTER it.

There is a huge quantity of work to do to improve this situation, but thankfully some people are out there trying to do that very hard work.

The Backwards Man wrote: »

Science isn't infallible, no matter what scientists would have you believe.

I am not aware of scientists attempting to have us believe that. So you are some what straw manning there. What scientists would have you believe is that the methodology of science is not perfect, but it has proven itself consistently and repeatedly to be the BEST method.... by far..... that we have devised so far to ascertain the truths about and within our universe.

The Backwards Man wrote: »

They don't have any more answers than the rest of the us, they just spend longer looking at the questions.

Simply not true. Science has answered questions that no one else has answered correctly, and has replaced answers to questions from other sources (usually religion) that were quite patently tosh. In fact through the progress of our science we not only have more answers to questions.... we even have more QUESTIONS that no one did, would have, or possibly even COULD have even thought to ask.

For example many in our species once believed that seizures were the result of demonic possession. But now we understand things like epilepsy.

Or some Freud fetishists used to think Capgrah Syndrome was the result of a release of latent sexual desire towards ones Mother, but using our science we now understand much about neuroanatomical damage.

Some people used to think extreme weather destroying crops were the actions of a vengeful god, but we now understand weather patterns and the geological vagaries of our planet.

Many people could not understand how animals, especially humans, could LOOK so designed without an intentional designer, but we now understand the moulding and "creative" effects of the blind and mindless processes of Natural Selection.

The list goes on, and on, and on. But suffice to say the discourse goes in one direction and one direction only. Science offers new and substantiated answers for questions that nonsense unsubstantiated answers existed for before. The opposite, thus far, never appears to be true.

So maybe it is PEDANTICALLY correct to say they do not have "more answers" than the rest of you. You all have the same amount of answers to the same amount of questions. They simply have more substantiated answers that offer a basis for thinking might actually be correct. A quality difference rather than a quantity one.

For example if someone answers every question with "God did it" then clearly they are answering the same amount of questions as we are. Their answers are just unsubstantiated nonsense.

The Backwards Man wrote: »

Until you tell a scientist they're wrong. . .

Science and scientists deal in substantiation. If a scientists takes issue with you telling them they are wrong.... they are likely doing so because they have no interest in your MERELY telling them they are wrong. They want you to tell them exactly HOW and WHY and on what BASIS you believe them to be wrong.

If you go around anyone, let alone scientists, simply telling them they are wrong.... you are likely to get a negative and even hostile result.

NiallBoo

gramar wrote: »

It can't be all flat. Isn't here a place where water flows uphill there?
Take that, science.

Chinese whispers - there's actually a lad called Walter who's into hiking.

bonzodog2

The infinite expanding universe, and the BigBang thing always strike me as dubious. Not that I'm a physicist or cosmologist or anything.

bazza1

Gravity is a myth....the Earth sucks! (Old T-shirt slogan!)

sullivlo

As a scientist you can never prove anything 100%. All you can do is provide all of the data and draw conclusions from it. It's never 100% proof. There's (nearly) always going to be some new experiment to come along and try and either disprove your theory or confirm it.

As Dara O'Briain said, science doesn't know everything. But science knows it doesn't know everything. Otherwise it would stop.

Speedwell

Can't make a better argument than this.

fizzypish

bazza1 wrote: »

You are having a laugh at my expense....Westmeath is not a real place!

Naw lad. Tis. Just go west.... from Meath....

steddyeddy

The Backwards Man wrote: »

Until you tell a scientist they're wrong. . .

I totally agree that a lot of scientists are dogmatic.

kierank01

This is the answer to the OP's question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

steddyeddy

Scientific method is valid but scientists are fallible.

There have been many many things that scientists have been wrong on. In fact they have been wrong on more things than they have got right. The point is to continuously try to prove yourself wrong.

A lot of scientists don't understand the scientific method and are dogmatic IMHO.

tritium

A lot of people seem to misunderstand science and think of it as some sort of belief system that sits in opposition to religion. Its greatest strength is actually religions greatest weakness, it actually wants to be wrong if that outcome leads to better greater knowledge. Feynman had a quote that captures it perfectly

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

RebelButtMunch

That ALL the water in earth came from meteors. Nah.

Skylinehead

faceman wrote: »

But science hasn't always got it right. The world was once flat. Dogs were pack animals. Lightning doesn't strike twice.

What science was used to justify a flat earth? Feels like more of an assumption than anything.

"Lighting doesn't strike twice" is an idiom, not science.

NiallBoo

RebelButtMunch wrote: »

That ALL the water in earth came from meteors. Nah.

Just realised they're still going - Eir seem to have really run them into the ground.

steddyeddy

I think the major mistake scientists have made in the past years is either denying a hypothesis completely or accepting one too readily. These are the flaws in scientists as people and not the scientific method.

steddyeddy

tritium wrote: »

A lot of people seem to misunderstand science and think of it as some sort of belief system that sits in opposition to religion. Its greatest strength is actually religions greatest weakness, it actually wants to be wrong if that outcome leads to better greater knowledge. Feynman had a quote that captures it perfectly

That's what the scientific method is T, not what all scientists do unfortunately.

Maximus Alexander

The Backwards Man wrote: »

Until you tell a scientist they're wrong. . .

You're right, telling them they're wrong won't get you very far.

Presenting them with evidence that they're wrong though; they love that.

Calibos

Leave OP alone guys!! He wants to keep his loophole so he can continue to believe nearly every scientist on the planet is wrong about anthropogenic climate change or that jet fuel can't melt steel beams.

Grayson

faceman wrote: »

Science is great, yay! Look at us with our iPhones and nuclear power.

But science hasn't always got it right. The world was once flat. Dogs were pack animals. Lightning doesn't strike twice.

All turned out to be bollocks.

So it's probably fair to say science believes things today that will be proven as nonsense in the decades to come.

For example. Ursula and Sabina Eriksson, the two crazy Swedish ladies who tried to kill themselves in a fit of rage on the M6 motorway in the UK in bizarre circumstances. Science explained their actions as 'folie a deux', otherwise known as 'shared psychosis'. (Where delusionary beliefs get transmitted to other people.)

I'm pretty sure this will be debunked in the years to come.

What other science stuff do we believe nowadays that you're pretty confident is nonsense?

The two bolded bits.

The belief that was world was flat wasn't justified. What I mean is that it was actually well known that the world was round. It had been known since greek times. Columbus knew the earth was round, he just thought it was smaller than it was. That was actually flying in the face of established knowledge. Eratosthenes had worked out how big the earth was and he was only off by about 10%. So Columbus knew the earth was round, so did everyone else. It's just that Columbus thought it was smaller than everyone else thought.

The second bolded bit. Psychology isn't a science. don't be silly

Grayson

On a side note. Eratosthenes had heard of a place in Ethiopia where on the summer solstace a large tower cast no shadow. So he knew that the sun was directly overhead. He knew in Alexandria (where he ran the fabled library) the sun cast a shadow. So he got a big stick on a beach and measured the angle of the shadow. He hired someone to walk to the place in Ethiopia and count their steps so he knew the distance. Using that information he was able to work out how round the earth was.
http://www.dummies.com/education/math/geometry/how-to-determine-the-earths-circumference/


The simple genius of this always astounds me.

ScumLord

faceman wrote: »

But science hasn't always got it right. The world was once flat. Dogs were pack animals. Lightning doesn't strike twice.

All turned out to be bollocks.

But aren't these all old wives tales? Not science.

The Backwards Man

Grayson wrote: »

On a side note. Eratosthenes had heard of a place in Ethiopia where on the summer solstace a large tower cast no shadow. So he knew that the sun was directly overhead. He knew in Alexandria (where he ran the fabled library) the sun cast a shadow. So he got a big stick on a beach and measured the angle of the shadow. He hired someone to walk to the place in Ethiopia and count their steps so he knew the distance. Using that information he was able to work out how round the earth was.
http://www.dummies.com/education/math/geometry/how-to-determine-the-earths-circumference/


The simple genius of this always astounds me.

Good job he didn't hire somebody with a club foot, all our sat navs would be out by miles.

Outlaw Pete

Piltdown Man!!

In the UK back in 1913 an amateur archaeologist managed to convince the scientific / paleontology community that he had discovered the missing link in the evolutionary chain... It was accepted as fact right up until 1953 when they found that the teeth on the ape's jaw had actually been filed down and so it was all a hoax.

Science reaches conclusions based on the best available evidence.

If better evidence emerges, then conclusions may change.

That's not the same as making it up.