It's all those northeners that're upside down. They just haven't realised yet.
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
maco144 » 02 Dec 2016 09:40 wrote:
How can the above heat map be true in the globe model given the tilt of the Earth?
Oh, you might want to research massless photons spontaneously becoming an electron bearing mass. It was quite a revelation to me.
Matter creation is the process inverse to particle annihilation. It is the conversion of massless particles into one or more massive particles. This process is the time reversal of annihilation.
Halton Christian "Chip" Arp (March 21, 1927 -- December 28, 2013) was an American astronomer. He was known for his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, which (it was later realized) catalogues many examples of interacting and merging galaxies. Arp was also known as a critic of the Big Bang theory and for advocating a non-standard cosmology incorporating intrinsic redshift."
Cleveland Cavaliers superstar Kyrie Irving was recently the talk of social media leading up to the NBA All-Star Game for sharing his belief that the earth is flat on the "Road Trippin' with RJ & Channing" podcast. Irving, who spent one year at Duke before being drafted with the number one pick in 2011, then doubled down on his belief in an interview with ESPN – "I've seen a lot of things that my educational system said was real and turned out to be completely fake" – before an astronomy professor from his alma mater and Bill Nye the Science Guy gave their two cents.
82_28 » Sat Feb 25, 2017 12:14 pm wrote:Sorry to dredge this wreck up again. But flat Earth is "a thing" now it appears. Where the fuck is it coming from? You got me. But I am seeing flat Earth shit popping up with a greater frequency.
These days, if you hear somebody talk about philosophy in the media, it’s probably a scientific materialist like Neil deGrasse Tyson ranting about how all philosophy is nonsense. The occasional work of philosophical exegesis still gets a page or two in the New York Review of Books now and then, but popular interest in the subject has vanished, and more than vanished: the sort of truculent ignorance about philosophy displayed by Tyson and his many equivalents has become just as common among the chattering classes as a feigned interest in the subject was a half century in the past.
Scientific inquiry itself is philosophically neutral—it’s possible to practice science from just about any philosophical standpoint you care to name—but the claim at the heart of scientific materialism, the dogmatic insistence that those things that can be investigated using scientific methods and explained by current scientific theory are the only things that can possibly exist, depends on arbitrary metaphysical postulates that were comprehensively disproved by philosophers more than two centuries ago. (We’ll get to those postulates and their problems later on.) Thus the ascendancy of scientific materialism in educated culture pretty much mandated the dismissal of philosophy.
...half the angry denunciations of philosophy you’ll hear these days from figures such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I’m convinced, come out of the simple fact that the claims of modern science to know objective truths about nature won’t stand up to fifteen minutes of competent philosophical analysis.
Engineers are trained to figure out what works. Give them a problem, and they’ll beaver away until they find a solution—that’s their job, and the engineering profession has been around long enough, and had enough opportunities to refine its methods of education, that a training in engineering does a fine job of teaching you how to work from a problem to a solution. What it doesn’t teach you is how to question the problem. That’s why, to turn to another example, you get entire books that start from the assumption that the book of Ezekiel was about a UFO sighting and proceed to work out, in impressive detail, exactly what the UFO must have looked like, how it was powered, and so on. “But how do we know it was a UFO sighting in the first place?” is the one question that never really gets addressed.
It’s occurred to me recently that another specific blindness seems to be hardwired into another mode of education, one that’s both prestigious and popular these days: a scientific education—that is to say, a technical education in the theory and practice of one of the hard sciences. The downside to such an education, I’d like to suggest, is that it makes you stupid about politics. Plenty of examples come to mind, and I’ll be addressing some of the others shortly, but the one I want to start with is classic in its simplicity, not to mention its simple-mindedness. This is the recent proposal by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, which I quote in full:
Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016
That might be dismissed as just another example of the thought-curtailing properties of Twitter’s 140-character limit—if a potter makes pots, what does Twitter make?—except that Tyson didn’t say, “here’s the principle behind the constitution, details to follow.” That’s his proposed constitution in its entirety.
More precisely, that’s his sound bite masquerading as a constitution. An actual constitution, as anyone knows who has actually read one, doesn’t just engage in a bit of abstract handwaving about how decisions are to be made. It sets out in detail who makes the decisions, how the decision-makers are selected, what checks and balances are meant to keep the decision-makers from abusing their positions, and so on. If Donald Trump, say, gave a speech saying, “We need a new scientific method that consists solely of finding the right answer,” he’d be mocked for not knowing the first thing about science. A similar response is appropriate here.
That said, Tyson’s proposal embodies another dimension of cluelessness about politics. Insisting that political decisions ought to be made exclusively on the basis of evidence sounds great, until you try to apply it to actual politics. Take that latter step, and what you’ll discover is that evidence is only tangentially relevant to most political decisions.
Belligerent Savant wrote:On a tangentially-related note, a few select excerpts from the Archdruid Report Re: N. deGrasse Tyson:
Astronomy Saves the World details the avoidable and unavoidable threats to our existence, and provides the case for astronomy being part of everyone's education. Astronomy will ensure our planet never again experiences a catastrophic cosmic impact from an asteroid or comet, and has shown that these ancient harbingers of death are now rich resources waiting to be reaped. Astronomy will lead us forward, away from an evolving sun, as we migrate throughout our solar system and beyond. But our future is hopeless without a well-informed and cohesive global society. We all need the sense of wonder and cosmic humility that astronomy instills. It is the great educational motivator regardless of demographic, and it is rich with history, science, art, engineering, music, and mathematics. It is the lesson for all humankind. Astronomy can be the key to comprehensive emancipation via education and provide us a united path into the deep future.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 43 guests