I offered to hit my lecturer with a chair and they could tell me when they thought that the physical reality was real rather than made up …they declined that invitation as well 😉

Interesting only the scientist actually read the data 😉

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Liberatory Science

Over the past two decades there has been extensive discussion among critical theorists with regard to the characteristics of modernist versus postmodernist culture; and in recent years these dialogues have begun to devote detailed attention to the specific problems posed by the natural sciences.75 In particular, Madsen and Madsen have recently given a very clear summary of the characteristics of modernist versus postmodernist science. They posit two criteria for a postmodern science:

A simple criterion for science to qualify as postmodern is that it be free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth. By this criterion, for example, the complementarity interpretation of quantum physics due to Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen school is seen as postmodernist.76

Clearly, quantum gravity is in this respect an archetypal postmodernist science. Secondly,

The other concept which can be taken as being fundamental to postmodern science is that of essentiality. Postmodern scientific theories are constructed from those theoretical elements which are essential for the consistency and utility of the theory.77

Thus, quantities or objects which are in principle unobservable — such as space-time points, exact particle positions, or quarks and gluons — ought not to be introduced into the theory.78 While much of modern physics is excluded by this criterion, quantum gravity again qualifies: in the passage from classical general relativity to the quantized theory, space-time points (and indeed the space-time manifold itself) have disappeared from the theory.

However, these criteria, admirable as they are, are insufficient for a liberatory postmodern science: they liberate human beings from the tyranny of absolute truth” and objective reality”, but not necessarily from the tyranny of other human beings. In Andrew Ross’ words, we need a science that will be publicly answerable and of some service to progressive interests.”79 From a feminist standpoint, Kelly Oliver makes a similar argument:

… in order to be revolutionary, feminist theory cannot claim to describe what exists, or, natural facts.” Rather, feminist theories should be political tools, strategies for overcoming oppression in specific concrete situations. The goal, then, of feminist theory, should be to develop strategic theories — not true theories, not false theories, but strategic theories.

It is an interesting , if complicated in parts, debate about uncertainty , the unknowable and finally I get to mention Godel and godelisation YAH.
However i am with Graham on this it does seem a bit wishy washy and offer a solution for resolving some confusing issues that dont really make much sense to me [ the solution that is] tbh

There is truth and their is fact [ i can accept that in certain areas it may not be binary [ true or false] but not for everything. I also like it when they use science to attack science ie using uncertainty to prove that science does not work when uncertainty comes form science so perhaps that is the bit that is wrong?

Anyway nice link if not for the faint hearted or the ill informed

By this criterion, for example, the complementarity interpretation of quantum physics due to Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen school is seen as postmodernist.

Displays a fundamental lack of understanding of what quantum physics actaully is.

QP isn’t imprecise it describe with incredible accuracy what goes on. It doesn’t reject physical laws, it replaces them with more accurate versions.

Its not wishy washy its just piffle! Nonsense couched in academic speak to make unconstructed ramblings baffling enough for readers to think there must be meaning somewhere.

Borrowing from the language of science in one breath and then critisizing it in another.

Try typing a response on a post-modern computer!

we should have used the scientific oracle that is Google – see i think first Derek 😉

Sokal is best known to the general public for the Sokal Affair of 1996. Curious to see whether the then-non-peer-reviewed postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University Press) would publish a submission which “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions,” Sokal submitted a grand-sounding but completely nonsensical paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”[3][4]

The journal did in fact publish it, and soon thereafter Sokal then revealed that the article was a hoax in the journal Lingua Franca,[5] arguing that the left and social science would be better served by intellectual underpinnings based on reason. He replied to leftist and postmodernist criticism of the deception by saying that his motivation had been to “defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself.”

The affair, together with Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition, can be considered to be a part of the so-called Science wars.

Sokal followed up by co-authoring the book Impostures Intellectuelles with Jean Bricmont in 1997 (published in English, a year later, as Fashionable Nonsense). The book accuses other academics of using scientific and mathematical terms incorrectly and criticizes proponents of the strong program for denying the value of truth. The book had mixed reviews, with some lauding the effort[citation needed], some more reserved[6][7], and others pointing out alleged inconsistencies and criticizing the authors for ignorance of the fields under attack and taking passages out of context.[8]

In 2008, Sokal revisited the Sokal affair and its implications in Beyond the Hoax.

Not sure if the poster who linked to it here knew or did not know but they get to choose which ever option best flatters them 😀

For Graham…x

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNbU2-9YcGI[/video]

junky check your email’s I sent you an hour ago, you pillock, you buggered my trick. Anyway your first post after reading it, you fell for it..

I’m confiscating your tea and medals, and when the spitfires fly past one of them is going to open up the Browning 303’s on you..

I cannot access my e-mail at work and sorry it would have been a good ruse

Aye I did treat it as real,…but i always had you down as the honest type , forgive me 😉

The funny thing about both you and rich saying this :

I offered to hit my lecturer with a chair and they could tell me when they thought that the physical reality was real rather than made up …they declined that invitation as well

I Invited my lecturer to test if gravity was a social construct by opening the window and carrying out the lecture from the other side. She politely declined – we were on the fourth floor!

When it is one of Sokal’s most famous quotes:

Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)

Well played toys

To be fair I did spot it was bullshit, i just didn’t spot it was deliberate bullshit.

I like it though. Its a bit like the experiment psychiartic students carried out on mental hopitals in the sixties to demonstrate alot of mental health diagnoses were a sham

Rosenhan Experiment

To be fair I did spot it was bullshit, i just didn’t spot it was deliberate bullshit.

I think that was Sokal’s point, that post modernism was a form of bullshit (intentional or not) that was indishtinguishable from actual, real live, deliberate bullshit. It makes me smirk every every time.

The Rosenshan expt is another piece of awesomeness that I like. It’s a reflection of our modern society.

Somebody needs to do the same thing with the police, devise a way of getting innocent people into the hands of an arresting officer, custody sargeant and CPS and see if the same thing happens…..

“I am convinced that it is the Coppers job to “diagnose” criminals , so if you get stopped by the cops they will find some “symptom” or other that identifies you as a wrong doer and off to court you go. ..”

skimmed through this thread.

So is the argument is whether science is real?

I always remember the startling fact that the patients [ the mad] are better at spotting the sane than the medically qualified sane.

The debate was about whether science could find universal truths or any kind of truth. Detractors felt that we were either just being arrogant or all knowledge was uncertain and we could not prove/know anything – ie we may just be bacteria on the Petri dish

@Junkyard – thanks

What a strange argument.

For Graham…x

Oh great now, the “protective powers of the universe are activated” in my office. The cleaners are not going to be happy about this.

(is it me or does it sound like they are chanting “Goin’ up your ring eh”)

So is the argument is whether science is real?

I think the main thrust has been pro-scientists saying “we don’t know everything, but we do know a couple of important things” versus the post-modernist stoners saying “you’re so arrogrant, how can you possibly claim to know everything??” 😀

So is the argument is whether science is real?

no.. I think the argument is more whether or not real is science..

I notice a few times ‘pro-science’ is mentioned a few times…are there people on here who are openly ‘anti-science’?

Yunki keeping it real since pharmaceuticals were discovered [ by scientists] for keeping it real 😉

are there people on here who are openly ‘anti-science’?

no.. certainly not on this thread

although you wouldn’t have thought it by the way the pro-science lobby so quickly circle their wagons and started shooting at anything that moves..

very peculiar I reckon.. such an aggressive defence indicates a deep underlying insecurity in my opinion.. maybe they are not so sure of the facts as they like to so loudly proclaim..?

I’m not quite sure why you need to keep referencing the fact that I used drugs in my youth Junkyard..? It’s quite a personal attack.. from such a black pot.. 😉

very peculiar I reckon.. such an aggressive defence indicates a deep underlying insecurity in my opinion.. maybe they are not so sure of the facts as they like to so loudly proclaim..?

I’d make a good defence of 1+1 always making 2 if someone was trying to argue that it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean I’ve got some deep underlying insecurity about whether it’s true or not.

no.. I think the argument is more whether or not real is science..

Genuinely lolled at that one.

Anyway back on topic.

UFO’s no, Aliens yes.

Here’s my reasoning.

I did a bit a wild camping at Easter on a beach on Islay, needless to say sand got everywhere. As I was walking back to the car and brushing sand off all my gear and clothes the thought “Each grain a star” entered my head. Most of us will have have heard that there are roughly a similar number of stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. That beach on Islay was equivalent to our galaxy.

From the perspective of an individual grain of sand it was vast (for all practical purposes at that scale it was infinite). Thinking about the universe in similar terms (we aren’t even a grain of sand) and it just becomes impossible to imagine there isn’t other life out there.

But the very scale, the vastness of the near infinite, means that it does a very good impression of us being alone in it.

> are there people on here who are openly ‘anti-science’?
no.. certainly not on this thread

Yunki is definitely not “anti-science”.

I mean yeah, okay, he roundly dismisses chemistry, says spectroscopy is “a religious cult” and claims that maths and physics are a “con art invented by scraggly little toads who can’t get laid “.

And he describes the “science monkeys” on here as “narrow minded”, “insecure young men” who he repeatedly calls “arrogant” for claiming that “the majority of science’s work is done” and that has “pretty accurately accounted for much of what we see around us” (despite the fact precisely no one has made such a claim).

But yeah, he is all about the pro-science 😆

It’s quite a personal attack.. from such a black pot..

Racialist!

I’m not quite sure why you need to keep referencing the fact that I used drugs in my youth Junkyard..? It’s quite a personal attack.. from such a black pot.

buuuuut..

all I’ve been saying throughout this thread, is can you accept that at some point in the future, someone may come along and say

‘yes, 1+1 does indeed always make 2.. but what you didn’t realise is that 1+1 is also the colour of a butterfly’s contented sigh..’?

It just seems to me a little cultish that because a couple of people have suggested that there may be more to this than meets the eye you have all gotten rather upset..

Science is very neat and prosaic way of explaining what stuff is made of and how it works.. I just like to wonder if perhaps there is any more than that..
I don’t particularly care if there is and certainly don’t have faith in there being more.. I only have faith in music, beer and sex and laughter mostly.. I just think that deny any possibility of an alternative explanation is a bit.. err.. daft

😕

Science is very neat and prosaic way of explaining what stuff is made of and how it works.. I just like to wonder if perhaps there is any more than that..

If there is, and of course there is, then good luck finding it by “wondering”.

I reckon science might beat you to it.

just think that deny any possibility of an alternative explanation is a bit.. err.. daft

You’re missing the point though. Science is all about seeking alternative explanations. Not accepting that thunder is created by a someone who lives at the end of a rainbow with a beard, a helmet and a hammer for instance.

Lots of people don’t die of ulcers because an Australian doctor looked for an alternative explanation for them other than stress and spicy food. He discovered the H pylori bacteria which is responsible for the majority of peptic ulcers and can actually be quite easily treated.

If you want a nice example of science NOT being “neat and prosaic” and doing a good job of demonstrating that there IS something more, then I’d suggest you read up on Quantum Entanglement.

Take two particles, let them physically interact, then separate them by say 16km.

Now when you measure the state of one particle and the other will instantly adopt the “opposite” state, despite the fact there is no obvious connection between them.

Spooky.

‘yes, 1+1 does indeed always make 2.. but what you didn’t realise is that 1+1 is also the colour of a butterfly’s contented sigh..’?

It just seems to me a little cultish that because a couple of people have suggested that there may be more to this than meets the eye you have all gotten rather upset..

Science is very neat and prosaic way of explaining what stuff is made of and how it works.. I just like to wonder if perhaps there is any more than that..
I don’t particularly care if there is and certainly don’t have faith in there being more.. I only have faith in music, beer and sex and laughter mostly.. I just think that deny any possibility of an alternative explanation is a bit.. err.. daft

Maybe someone will come along in the future and show us that 1+1 is the color of a butterfly’s contented sigh- who knows? Although I don’t think it’s too likely 😉

But that idea is, well, useless. It’s fun to ramble on about stuff like that in the pub, but it actually gets us absolutely nowhere. It’s not testable, it can’t form the basis of any models, it can’t be used to help us learn anything more or make any more discoveries, or help us build computers or space probes to bring back samples from asteroids, or telescopes to see deeper into the universe.

Boring old narrow minded 1+1=2 does let us do that, and by doing that we find out more and more, which might eventually get us round to butterfly sighs I suppose, or clean energy, or finding out that dogs can smell earthquakes or whatever. But we’ll never get there by going “yeah, but… ” whenever we set out what we do know. It’s not arrogance, it’s just getting on with it.

Science is actually out there constantly pushing back the envelope- actually finding out crazy new things and expanding our model of the universe, based on things we already know (as far as is possible) to be true.

If you think the way to expand our horizons is to dismiss that and instead sit about dreaming up untestable exceptions to rules and models that nobody anywhere has ever seen broken in the entire history of humanity then I think you can expect that some people are going to disagree!
It might be that those rules do have exceptions but there’s only one way to find out.

Science is very neat and prosaic way of explaining what stuff is made of and how it works.. I just like to wonder if perhaps there is any more than that..

There’s certainly more to life than science. Science is an orientation, an approach and a mode of understanding (having to do with number, measurement and identifying relationships). As the more pragmatic scientists have been saying, they do not make a claim to truth per se but rather that their approach does tend to bring results that are highly useful for society.

Much of this thread is underpinned by a weary invocation of CP Snow’s Two Cultures and similar debates going back at least as far as the Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment. In this thread, the humanities have been utterly misrepresented (“militant postmodernist” being my favourite) and I’m guessing there are a few arts/humanities folk who are watching but staying out.

Science has given us many things over the years, the death of 99.8% of peoples interest in this thread, and a nice big old pissing contest tangent taken from its original topic being one… Nice one Science!

Inquiry takes us to all sorts of places! 😉

a nice big old pissing contest

going back at least as far as the Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment

At least we are in good company then 😀

Some properly arrogant physics explaining everything:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVO0HgMi6Lc[/video]

It just seems to me a little cultish

Typo? 😉

Nice video link graham I will watch some of those with my kids.

Anyone here believe in UFO’s? I know UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object but I mean in the sense of alien visitors.

If someone had traveled the vast distance to get here, it would be jolly rude if they didn’t stop and say hello.

Nice video link graham I will watch some of those with my kids.

They are good – but quite fast paced. 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium is also good for simple “wow physics!” videos:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liqF6EamiE4[/video]

He does some nice multi-choice ones (you might have to watch them at YouTube for annotations to work):
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1erU-Cwcl2c[/video]

SixtySymbols videos, http://www.youtube.com/user/sixtysymbols are also excellent if you want a little more depth:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMqPT6oKJ8[/video]

Yay for YouTube. Not just for watching cats fall over.

bleurrrgh..

ok.. It seems that I’ve been utterly misunderstood..

I’m not anti-science, never have been never will be.. and I’m certainly not pro-stoner theory either.. I find both interesting in the same way that I enjoy art or cars or literature.. I’m extremely anti some of the stuff that was posted in this thread though..

When I said that to claim there is only our one periodic table in the entire universe seemed to me to be arrogant, it wasn’t because I had a different theory that I thought was superior.. I was simply pondering the possibility of there being more out there to be discovered.. I certainly don’t think science is useless.. and I don’t claim to have a more useful way of doing things..
I’m glad that others are interested enough to care though.. and I fully appreciate the importance of science and the endless hard work..

I tried a bit of poorly judged caustic banter earlier in the thread which ruffled some feathers.. and caused some people to leap to conclusions about who I am and what I stand for..
I’m truly sorry for making this thread such a thoroughly disgusting display of quasi-intellectual posturing.. and that it degenerated into name calling and sarcasm and all round insolent vitriol..

FWIW I’m not really interested in the slightest in finding answers to the mysteries of life personally speaking.. like someone said it’s a fun topic to ramble on in the pub..

I find all the answers I need in music, and in the twinkle of an eye, or the bottom of a glass, or atop a windswept moor..

I think I misunderstood what some posters were about.. your attitudes seemed at first glance to be completely closed to new ideas..and I needed to challenge that.. (very poorly it turns out)

..and some of you (you know who you are) deliberately antagonised me at every opportunity.. **** s

When I said that to claim there is only our one periodic table in the entire universe seemed to me to be arrogant, it wasn’t because I had a different theory that I thought was superior.. I was simply pondering the possibility of there being more out there to be discovered..

Can I pick this point up? Not to dismiss you, but just to discuss it? Pub-stylee.

It is possible that somewhere in the vast universe, there are (some exotic equivalent of) chemical elements that are not made of atoms.

It is even possible as you suggested earlier, that our solar system (or galaxy) is a bit unusual with all this atom stuff, and actually distant stars are made of these undiscovered non-atom elements which for some reason produce an emission spectrum that exactly matches our atom-based elements.

If quantum physics teaches us anything it’s that we should expect counter-intuitive weirdness from the universe.

But… currently we have absolutely no reason to suspect that to be the case (other than random wonderings). The current atomic element model we have holds for everything we can test here, including everything we can observe from deep space, and it has allowed us to accurately predict and then create “new” elements that didn’t previously exist on Earth.

So yes, claiming our periodic table is the only one we’d ever need to describe elements in the universe is perhaps a bold claim, but so far, justified.

ok.. I accept that.. couldn’t see the woods for the trees earlier on.. 😳

I’m more than ready to turn a corner in this discussion.. and you’ve mentioned the observable universe a few times..

Now I don’t even watch science docs on TV so excuse me if I get this muddled up..
What we can observe appears to be a doughnut shape..? Which is expanding or contracting or both.. I’m going to guess and say the reason that we see a doughnut shape could be a number of different things..

poor visibility with an unknown cause (dark matter etc..?)
wierd shaped universe
something else

ok

do we have any idea what is beyond the observable universe..?

more universe..?
the dungeon dimensions..?
Dark Matter and/or other recent discoveries..?
the edge of the vacuum flask..?
chocolate butter cream..?
the final episode of Eastenders..?
god only knows..?

What we can observe appears to be a doughnut shape..?

IIRC, there was one theory that the universe might have a torus (doughnut) shape. I don’t recall it being much more than a theory though.

The observable universe is a sphere, because from a (relatively) single observation point we can observe as far in all directions. That has no bearing on the shape of the universe though, just how much of it we can see.

I think.

do we have any idea what is beyond the observable universe..?

We have ideas, sure. I posted figures earlier, but our best guess is that the whole universe is 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger than the bit we can see.

It’s even more fun that that.

“Observable Universe” really means two things:

There is the amount of universe we can observe/measure/detect from Earth with our current technology (I think I overstated this earlier: a bit of googling suggests that the furthest we have “seen” is about 30 billion light years).

But the true scientific meaning is the amount of the universe we could possibly “see” even if we had the best detectors that could ever be built because those galaxies are so far away that the light from them hasn’t reached us yet and, due to the expansion of the universe, it never will. We will never see them from here.

That distance is reckoned to be around 46 billion light years from Earth.

do we have any idea what is beyond the observable universe..?

Ideas yes. Theories yes. “More universe” seems like the most likely.
But until someone volunteers to go a few billion light years away from us to find out, nothing is absolutely certain. That would be arrogant 😉

Bear in mind though that this limit is just an arbitrary “how far we can see from our planet”. There is nothing cosmologically special about it – so no real reason to suspect that it’s suddenly all marshmallows from 46.1 billion light years onwards.

Yunki this is for you:

I did a bit a wild camping at Easter on a beach on Islay, needless to say sand got everywhere. As I was walking back to the car and brushing sand off all my gear and clothes the thought “Each grain a star” entered my head. Most of us will have have heard that there are roughly a similar number of stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. That beach on Islay was equivalent to our galaxy.

From the perspective of an individual grain of sand it was vast (for all practical purposes at that scale it was infinite). Thinking about the universe in similar terms (we aren’t even a grain of sand) and it just becomes impossible to imagine there isn’t other life out there.

I want to return to my beach anaology and how it demonstrates a little about our understanding of the universe. So imagine you are a super smart microscopic person living on a grain of sand on a beach. You are so small that the grain of sand is on the scale of a planet to you.

But as I said you are super smart so you you have already worked out how some of the physical laws work on you grain of sand like gravity etc. From your grain of sand you can see lots of other grains of sand that look pretty similar to the one you live on so you assume quite naturally that the laws that work on your grain of sand are most likely the same on the others.

One day you invent a telescope and you peer across the entire beach and see that everywhere its just more grains of sand. “Wow!” you think “this beach is huge” but you realise its all just grains of sand, everywhere as far as your telescope can see. So you conclude that the physical laws that you have worked out are universal as the “universe” looks pretty much identical in every direction.

This is called the Copernican principle or the principle of mediocrity. Its not because science lacks imagination its a fundamental part of how physical laws are applied

One