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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (23294)	1/7/2004 5:03:25 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793677

There are a lot of heads of Physic's Departments that should be wearing Bishop's robes. You understood me perfectly. :) Derek

To: LindyBill who wrote (23294)	1/7/2004 6:15:36 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793677

Crichton's comment on string theory was that it was based on a premise that could never be proved. Bill, I agree heartily with Crichton on the problem of consensus science. But I think we go just as wrong if we accept only what can be proven. That was fine when Newton and Boyle were dealing with what could be definitively proven. But we've moved past that into areas that can't be physically proven with experiments. We can't just stop progress. We have to find a way of moving forward with uncertainty. Just because consensus isn't the way to do that doesn't mean that we wash our hands of whatever cannot be proven. It seems to me that honesty about the status of any given science is the best approach. Evolution is an example of why we need to distinguish between known fact and accepted theory. Nothing so arouses some folks as the cavalier assumption that evolution is fact. It isn't. But that doesn't mean we should write it off. There are a lot of heads of Physic's Departments that should be wearing Bishop's robes. I don't have a clue about string theory. If people are passing beliefs off as facts, we shouldn't let that stand. But neither should we dismiss not-proven as superstition. Models and mathematics aren't the same as duplicated experiments, but neither are they valueless.