4 ms·

Wow. Thank you for you thoughtful and long replies. > ...you have to decide at some point where you can trust the results of others. Exactly. My personal atti

Wow. Thank you for you thoughtful and long replies. > ...you have to decide at some point where you can trust the results of others. Exactly. My personal attitude in asking is very much in the "hacker spirit"; mainly I point out appeals to authority as an identification of an opportunity to dig deeper. > Foucault pendulum Oh! That's a thing I had forgotten. Back in the day, I remeber using several of these and correlating their positions against rotation rates to estimate the Earth's radius. Not quite a backyard experiment though. > "The Ring of Truth" miniseries It seems this is on YouTube. Thanks for the pointer! The oil drop experiment sounds really cool. > Moon does have an atmosphere... all you can do is set an upper bound for the thickness of the atmosphere. Fair enough. You're speaking more precisely than I. I'm also wondering at what point the variance drops beneath the noise from Earth's atmosphere. This is something that's worth taking a top-down approach by initially trusting our Handbook of Physics and Chemistry and slowly working our way back. Anyway, thanks again for your in-depth replies. You must be an amazing conversation partner!

dwaltrip 9y ago
I really like everything eesmith wrote. I'm all about understanding on a deeper level how things work and how pieces of the world fit together. I also think re-proving fundamental knowledge with simple experiments is awesome. For the general question of knowing how we can trust modern knowledge, there is another useful angle. We can look at the technological devices and items in the world, and try to imagine how they work so reliably and precisely. For example, things like digital cameras, microwaves, mcat machines, gps devices, weather predictions, infrared goggles, sunblock, pneumatic machinery, one-way mirrors, miniature electronics, etc... the list goes on Why are these things so reliable? How do they work? It's very hard to imagine a world in which these countless devices exist, and yet the corresponding science is not very well-understood or robust, at least without jumping too far off the deep end. Of course, it's a fantastic exercise to try to research and understand which individual bits of scientific knowledge are required for the various modern technological devices that we encounter. I know you don't think that the foundations of modern knowledge are shaky. I just thought that your questions were considerate and genuine, and that you might appreciate this additional way of analyzing things. Edit: Watching the Ring of Truth right now... very cool program. Makes me want to do some observations myself.
- eesmith 9y ago
  Thanks to both of you for the praise. You might also be interested in "The Secret Life of Machines". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Machines and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDpNQQqdSh8&list=PLByTa5duIolYRtq45Cz_GmtzfWJyA4bik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDpNQQqdSh8&list=PLByTa5duIo... . Philip Morrison (from Ring of Truth) is perhaps best known for his powers-of-10 movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_(film) . He was also a columnist for Scientific American. The only column I remember is when he decided to make bread from scratch. Really from scratch. They grew wheat in a small plot of land near his home in Cambridge, Mass. He's part of the generation that developed the first atomic bomb. He carried the first core to the Trinity test site in the back seat of his car, and helped load the weapons on the planes that went to Japan.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    Ah yeah, I remember the powers of ten video. Great way to visualize the concept of scale, and to get a broad look at the universe as we understand it. Thanks for the other links, I'll have to check them out!

dwaltrip 9y ago

I really like everything eesmith wrote. I'm all about understanding on a deeper level how things work and how pieces of the world fit together. I also think re-proving fundamental knowledge with simple experiments is awesome. For the general question of knowing how we can trust modern knowledge, there is another useful angle. We can look at the technological devices and items in the world, and try to imagine how they work so reliably and precisely. For example, things like digital cameras, microwaves, mcat machines, gps devices, weather predictions, infrared goggles, sunblock, pneumatic machinery, one-way mirrors, miniature electronics, etc... the list goes on Why are these things so reliable? How do they work? It's very hard to imagine a world in which these countless devices exist, and yet the corresponding science is not very well-understood or robust, at least without jumping too far off the deep end. Of course, it's a fantastic exercise to try to research and understand which individual bits of scientific knowledge are required for the various modern technological devices that we encounter. I know you don't think that the foundations of modern knowledge are shaky. I just thought that your questions were considerate and genuine, and that you might appreciate this additional way of analyzing things. Edit: Watching the Ring of Truth right now... very cool program. Makes me want to do some observations myself.

eesmith 9y ago
Thanks to both of you for the praise. You might also be interested in "The Secret Life of Machines". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Machines and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDpNQQqdSh8&list=PLByTa5duIolYRtq45Cz_GmtzfWJyA4bik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDpNQQqdSh8&list=PLByTa5duIo... . Philip Morrison (from Ring of Truth) is perhaps best known for his powers-of-10 movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_(film) . He was also a columnist for Scientific American. The only column I remember is when he decided to make bread from scratch. Really from scratch. They grew wheat in a small plot of land near his home in Cambridge, Mass. He's part of the generation that developed the first atomic bomb. He carried the first core to the Trinity test site in the back seat of his car, and helped load the weapons on the planes that went to Japan.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Ah yeah, I remember the powers of ten video. Great way to visualize the concept of scale, and to get a broad look at the universe as we understand it. Thanks for the other links, I'll have to check them out!