kennyc wrote:Oh For Fucks Sake!
......

I'm outta here.

Indeed. It seems like another thread has turned into 'dictionary corner'.....

The people on this forum do know this is the "pseudoscience" part right? Or am I mistaken?

It's time to post some UFO polls... aaaawwww yeaaaa

campermon wrote:

kennyc wrote:Oh For Fucks Sake!
......

I'm outta here.

Indeed. It seems like another thread has turned into 'dictionary corner'.....

Indeed. I'm an advocate for semantics, but there comes a point...

hackenslash wrote:

campermon wrote:

kennyc wrote:Oh For Fucks Sake!
......

I'm outta here.

Indeed. It seems like another thread has turned into 'dictionary corner'.....

Indeed. I'm an advocate for semantics, but there comes a pint...

fify

The_Metatron wrote:
Why bother with the business of debunking?

All that is required is to point, laugh, and require them to support their claims.

This is the "debunking" portion of "pseudoscience"? Or am I mistaken?

The index goes:

Board index < Debunk It < General Debunking < pseudoscience

All I have seen now is people just saying they will not read the paper. How does one "debunk" something they won't read?

Why don't you debunk it for our entertainment?

hackenslash wrote:Why don't you debunk it for our entertainment?

Yes please!

Meanwhile I'll have a pint of Living in the Cask, please.

laklak wrote::popcorn:

Meanwhile I'll have a pint of Living in the Cask, please.

Here you go sir!

hackenslash wrote:Why don't you debunk it for our entertainment?

I have a list of things that I question... such as ad hoc formulations of neutrino oscillations out of the Sun. The Sun is missing neutrinos, yet not, because the neutrinos now oscillate... how does one test the neutrinos to make sure they were not oscillating when it was coming out of the Sun? If there are not enough neutrinos to account for all the nuclear reactions and all the heat, how is the additional heat produced if not by nuclear reactions?! This guy states that the energy produced is mostly from plasma recombination... wild stuff really. It would mean the Sun is a shell, and doesn't contain an interior because it were volume recombination it would require pressures in excess of 1*10^4 Pa, the plasma recombination at pressures below that requires a third body to maintain the conservation of energy and momentum... This would make the Sun an almost perfect sphere!!! and guess what? IT IS!!

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/16/sun-perfect-sphere-nature

Plus what really got me into all of this is because of Fred Hoyle. I was looking into him, the person who coined the term, "Big Bang" and found it was actually him making fun of the theory, because he considered it to be pseudoscience! This is the guy who literally wrote the book on stellar evolution!

I know this sounds like rambling, but I was only taught one side of the story in college. I never knew about this Halton Arp guy!! I highly doubt people on this forum knew about him either.

campermon wrote:

laklak wrote::popcorn:

Meanwhile I'll have a pint of Living in the Cask, please.

Here you go sir!

Pour yourself one, lad, looks like we're settling in for a long one.

laklak wrote:

campermon wrote:

laklak wrote::popcorn:

Meanwhile I'll have a pint of Living in the Cask, please.

Here you go sir!

Pour yourself one, lad, looks like we're settling in for a long one.

I prefer clear thinkers with this one.

Board index < debunk it < general debunking < pseudoscience < people who won't even read the theory like I have

Space Trucker wrote:

laklak wrote:

campermon wrote:

laklak wrote::popcorn:

Meanwhile I'll have a pint of Living in the Cask, please.

Here you go sir!

Pour yourself one, lad, looks like we're settling in for a long one.

I prefer clear thinkers with this one.

Board index < debunk it < general debunking < pseudoscience < people who won't even read the theory like I have

I read plenty enough to know it was not worth my time.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

Jeffrey J Wolynski wrote:...This common sense is ignored for reasons unknown by the author, but is probably because of graduate school not allowing students to think on their own for the sake of their careers.

Didn't even get out of the abstract section, and we have conspiracy theory. Why go on?

Space Trucker wrote:I was only taught one side of the story in college.

What fucking college was that? The college where they teach you that in college you learn that there's two sides to every story?

I am rather late to this thread and just want to say, on the subject of nomenclature, that we would be doing science the wrong way round if we were to start with definitions of terms and then derive our conclusions from those defined terms.

It’s certainly the way the law, for instance, works, where you do indeed have to establish whether a set of facts falls within a certain legal definition or not in order to be able to work out the consequences that then ensue in law; and it seems that this is also the way theology works; but it is not helpful in science. In science the important thing is how things behave, not what they are called; names are merely labels to assist communication, they are useful, but only up to a point, and they are particularly unhelpful close to the boundary between two concepts.

There are obvious differences, for instance, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean, and it is very useful (I imagine) in practical, seafaring life to distinguish between these concepts; but it would be obviously foolish to make that distinction too absolute and try to define a boundary somewhere in the Straits of Gibraltar where this molecule belongs to the Atlantic and that molecule to the Mediterranean.

I remember an anecdote related by Richard Dawkins in one of his books (and I admit to my shame that when I first read it I didn’t immediately see what was wrong with it, being at the time more used to mathematics than science). One of the members of the audience, a lawyer, came up to him after a talk he had given and challenged him to explain how, if one species can evolve into a different species over many generations, it was possible that parents belonging to the older species at some point in that succession of generations had offspring that belonged to a different species. That misses the point altogether, and the fallacy is that a species concept appropriate to today’s fauna is being misapplied to a different time at which the range of available species was different. Those parents were, of course, of the same species as their offspring. Were they of the same species as us? Maybe, maybe not: who cares? The question is of no importance.

Finally, on stars and planets: We observe that, in the universe, there are objects whose mass is so great that their gravitational contraction creates a pressure in their core and, in consequence, a temperature there that causes fusion: first merely of protons (hydrogen), later, if the mass is sufficient, of heavier nuclei. That fusion releases energy that causes the object to radiate over a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, including visible light. This luminosity is a rather significant feature that they all have in common, and so they might as well have a name (“star”); but giving them that name doesn’t in itself have any scientific significance.

Other objects, such as the Earth, or Jupiter, have also, like stars, coalesced in space under their own gravitational attraction, but that gravitational contraction doesn’t give rise to a temperature sufficient to trigger nuclear fusion: their mass is insufficient. Nothing very exciting happens inside those objects (nothing that excites an astrophysicist, anyway): they just cool very gradually over the aeons. Again, these objects might as well have a name, and that name is “planet”, at least at a first approximation.

Some celestial objects have a mass in an intermediate range. Their mass causes them to collapse, and the pressure increases, but with these objects there comes a point when the electrons in their core are so close together that they become degenerate, their wave-like properties become relevant, and pressure and temperature are decoupled from one another. The pressure can increase, but the temperature doesn’t, and consequently nuclear fusion cannot commence. With a star, if electron degeneracy occurs at all, the temperature necessary to trigger nuclear fusion has already been reached; with these objects it never is. These objects have a name too, and it is “brown dwarf”. Is a brown dwarf a planet? Maybe. Who cares? It’s a brown dwarf.

This has been a bit verbose; sorry about that.

Good post Yves.