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This idea that we are so sure of everything is pervasive. The kind of people who like science are often the kind of people who crave certainty. And so for them

This idea that we are so sure of everything is pervasive. The kind of people who like science are often the kind of people who crave certainty. And so for them science becomes like a religion, it provides them with a sense of certainty. Consistency. So when they rally against stories like this what they are really doing is reaffirming their own faith in an orderly universe, reaffirming their own faith in their scientific religion. It serves an emotional need. Which is why, paradoxically, their arguments are not alterable through logic. If you go read what the real experts in a field have to say about the state of knowledge, they are often incredibly humble. They state that there is so much that they do not know. That are so many things that could be wrong. That there are even bigger pictures just beyond their grasp. Now these reactionless thruster concepts don't look to be doing too well. But I for one am not particularly convinced that mach 's principle is so stupid.

jacquesm 6y ago
This sort of argument is routinely used to dismiss the laws of thermodynamics as merely 'theories' and to then move on to the most outrageous violations of known physical law. We are pretty sure of what we are sure of and we are pretty sure of what we aren't sure of, impressions notwithstanding. Science is a method, not a set of facts, and it has a built in mechanism to allow greater insights to replace lesser ones. As long as we stick to science we'll one day find the limits of what is knowable.
- marvin 6y ago
  I don't think you and GP are in disagreement. The scientific method to let greater insights replace lesser ones is precisely to try and fail at falsifying observations that violate known physical laws. No physical law is holy for this purpose, although scientists will necessarily have heuristics for what presumed observations they consider good enough to examine closer. Evidently, the EmDrive observations made the threshold! And now we know for sure. Well, close enough, anyway.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > As long as we stick to science we'll one day find the limits of what is knowable. I’m rather inclined to believe the opposite. That if we stick to science, we never will.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Feel free to go to aromatherapy, crystals, alchemy, astrology, free energy, ley lines, quackery and so on. I'll be on the other side of this debate and I'll stick to science. It has worked better than any other mechanism that we've thought of to-date to give us actionable insights as well as a ton of abstract knowledge.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      Huh? I was more trying to imply that there are probably no limits to what is knowable. Or at least, if we stay scientific, we should never believe we’ve reached the limits.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  > it has a built in mechanism to allow greater insights to replace lesser ones. As long as we stick to science Well you're not sticking to science when you assume any non-explained phenomenon is "impossible" and dismiss it outright. Science has a long list of "impossibles" that have been proven to be possible. Though of course that list was mostly of phenomenon we couldn't ignore. Saying "EMdrive is impossible given our current knowledge therefore it is not worth measuring" is tautological! Electricity and magnetism were seen as separate phenomenon as well and it seems a lot of people would be opposed to even try to put a compass next to a wire! The only thing I know is that the skeptics don't get the Nobel Prizes. Good, they measured, and as expected, no thrust. Cool.
  - JackFr 6y ago
    What makes this article so refreshing and so compelling is that they replicated the NASA results, and then explained and eliminated them. Another "We don't see anything and it's impossible anyway so you guys are idiots or charlatans" would not be helpful. This is.
  - Brian_K_White 6y ago
    Just because nothing is 100% knowable ultimately, doesn't mean all unknowns are equal. Everyone who doesn't want to invest 10000 human lives and a small countries total resources trying to find out if maybe oxidization isn't really exothermic but just somehow always looks that way (is fire hot?), isn't guilty of being incurious or religious. Come on now.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    Part of the problem is that it's much easier to come up with a new perpetual motion machine or reactionless drive concept than to prove that it doesn't work. After seeing them all fail, at a certain point people are going to stop paying them any attention. Oh, this time it uses X force in Y configuration? Go away until you have data, we could be more profitably spending time on just about anything else.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
- jchrisa 6y ago
  There is a strong argument to be made that there is no scientific method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism
  - sixstringtheory 6y ago
    Can’t say I agree with the idea, but it’s certainly interesting to consider and at the least should help strengthen or discard a few assumptions! I think he’s conflating the process with all the other human factors involved. Sure, Galileo maybe did some shady stuff to convince people of his arguments. But that in no way makes a telescope stop working the way it does.
  - oceanplexian 6y ago
    If you want to go down a rabbit hole, Nonlinear dynamics is another way to understand science. Many systems operate from a different paradigm of causality; it happens in biology, also common in fields like weather prediction where a large dataset is analyzed for patterns and then hypotheses are driven off the data in the opposite direction. This has caused some controversy in the scientific community because researchers have been caught using the methodology to "reverse engineer" hypotheses without disclosure, effectively gaming the system.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  "A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts." (Albert Einstein) "The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." (Sir Arthur Eddington)
- ipaddr 6y ago
  As plato would say the wall is choosing to hold us up. We may not understand why but it continues this way. At any point this could change. It wasn't until the theory of gravitation that we were able to define our obvervation as a general law. "Newton's law of universal gravitation is usually stated as that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers" This is still a law. We haven't proved this to be true even though it looks to be true. Laws can get superseeded. The phlogiston theory is a superseded scientific theory that postulated the existence of a fire-like element called phlogiston (/flɒˈdʒɪstən, floʊ-, -ɒn/)[1][2] contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory Another example is Luminiferous Aether https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether They are just theories in the end where most are probably correct somewhat.
techdragon 6y ago
Thank you for more eloquently expressing a sentiment that I have harboured for some time. After quoting the relevant Cave Johnson quote from PORTAL 2 so many times... it clicked and I came to the realisation that there is only one way to “do science” you “throw it at the wall and see if it sticks”. At a fundamental level, you must throw your results at the wall of publication and see if they stick, the only way science sticks is when it can be replicated by others. It remain on the wall! When people’s refutation of things like the em-drive is simply “this can’t work” my response is “prove it” not because I believe, but because “can’t work” just isn’t science, science is done by proving that something “does not work”. That means for something like the em-Drive you prove it doesn’t do what it claims, you prove it by replication and better measurement... and you learn how to build things better, learn how to measure better and that’s the value of these efforts! Or you prove it by detailed non destructive analysis of the experiment apparatus and prove your work by detailed physical simulation, publishing your code to prove you didn’t make any mistakes yourself! You cannot just give the answer you must show your work if you expect to go around calling what you do “science”. Providing such proof is not a waste, or bad science, it is the very essence of science itself.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  You are missing a very important part of how science is done: science starts with a hypothesis, the refutation or confirmation of that hypothesis is done by experiment. Plenty of science has been locked into the theoretical phase for decades before experimental verification could be obtained. If all we did was experiments we'd surely find some interesting stuff but without theory to guide where to do the next set of experiments science would be very inefficient. It's the closing of the loop that powers this tremendous progress you see from the renaissance to today. Without that we'd be stuck in alchemy, astrology and other pseudo sciences.
  - electrograv 6y ago
    Science must find a balance between extremes in how experimental resources are invested: Extreme “Exploitation” Bias: “For maximally economical progress, experimental physics must strictly stay within the hard boundaries established by theoretical frameworks.” Extreme “Exploration” Bias: “For maximally fundamental progress, experimental physics must question all theoretical assumptions and boundaries with extreme suspicion.” It makes sense to diversify the kind of experimental investments we make along this risk/reward or exploration/exploitation spectrum. There are unique dangers if we weight too heavily on either extreme.
karmelapple 6y ago
> The kind of people who like science are often the kind of people who crave certainty. Just to clarify - are you implying scientists crave certainty, or non-scientists who enjoy reading about science crave certainty? The life scientists I know are the people in my life who are the most comfortable with uncertainty, or at least can recognize how uncertain the world can be. Perhaps they crave quantifying the uncertainty? But they certainly understand, respect, and live with uncertainty.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  I took it to mean the fans of science who pile into forums like HN with expressive enthusiastic skepticism, the kind of people who think experimental physics is like working on a car.
- jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 6y ago
  > Just to clarify - are you implying scientists crave certainty, or non-scientists who enjoy reading about science crave certainty? Mostly the latter, but also the former to some degree. The scientists holding the status quo are often the most resistant to a paradigm shift.
kosievdmerwe 6y ago
Scientism. The deification of scientists and our current models. Which is ironic as we know our models are wrong somehow as we can't mesh Quantum mechanics and general relativity. There is clearly some undiscovered idea or principal. Science is about the process not about the body of knowledge we amassed. Science is about doing experiments to poke at the gaps of our knowledge. Not to like the Ancient Greeks debate our way to truth or worse declare something false based clearly on our flawed understanding.
- supernovae 6y ago
  Do you really believe this? Celebrity scientists aren't deified... in fact, they have a tough life because people assume they're all knowing. Look at our man Neil DeGrasse who called a Bull a Cow because where he lives in NYC everything is a cow and he got ripped by other scientists for being stupid. There is no universality to people period... i'm not sure why you feel its important to label some as "scientism" when there is no such thing as "scientism" with any universality.
  - kosievdmerwe 6y ago
    Scientists aren't deified because people assume they're all knowing? As for scientism, there's a lot of people in this thread who essentially said "We could have known it wouldn't work by basic application of conservation of momentum". Or some other principal held to the standard of absolute truth. Our knowledge of the world is faulty and incomplete. All scientific knowledge is subject to tweaking or replacement based on experimental evidence. Not the other way around. We have models and guesses of how the world works, we don't have its source code.
    - andi999 6y ago
      Actually the whole point why this EM drive is interesting actually is that the measurements contradicted conservation of momentum. Otherwise having a small effect not contradicting any established physics is basically worthless.
supernovae 6y ago
The framing of "science becomes like a religion" is just projection, nothing else... For many of us, we just accept that science is, what it is, and its the facts we know at this time. That doesn't mean unwavering absolute faith as implied by saying it's religious, it's just we don't feel the need to have knowledge be anything else other than knowledge that we continuously build upon. Of course in general, lots of scientists know much more than other scientists and there is always bickering, people who have their identities married to it and so much more - but often times those very same people are often religious too so i question if the religiosity argument really exists or if its merely weaponized by people who fear the comfort of others who are ok with science without faith.
- knodi 6y ago
  well everything is a people thing because we’re people. What science offers is proof and data that can be reproduced. So no two scientists bickering is not the same as two theologian.
  - supernovae 6y ago
    but to those who believe in theology it would appear as such...
- twodave 6y ago
  I appreciate the nuance here. As a person of faith one of the things I love most about both science and religion is the sheer amount of mystery there is in all of it. If there were no mystery in either, science would be dead and faith would be unnecessary. Yet science and religion pretend to be opposed. Throughout history the greatest clashes between faith and science have occurred when scientific understanding threatens the faith-based assumptions of the age. Imagine Abraham arguing with God over his request to sacrifice Isaac. Instead, he reasoned that God would find another way. Sometimes our understanding of religion limits our thinking with regard to not just science, but our faith as well.
- plutonorm 6y ago
  I'm an atheist. I also have a degree in comp sci a degree in Mathematics and a master's degree in mathematics. I read arxiv daily. I love science, I read constantly. Watching the cutting edge of science from afar is a passion of mine. I like to try to hold a holistic vision of it all in my head - an impossible task, but it keeps me busy. So, I'm not an enemy of science, I just dislike people harping on about 'impossible' from behind their keyboards when they have little more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject at hand and too high an opinion of authority.
ska 6y ago
> This idea that we are so sure of everything is pervasive I think this is a common misconception made mostly by people who distrust science as a whole, but not really broadly held. I don't know anyone who understands an area of science at any depth who holds such a view. The really broad problem is that in science there are things we have very high confidence in, and there are things we have very little confidence in but are the best working models currently - and everything in between. However, communication about where the confidence lies is often poorly done. Many observers who mostly hear about things through the lay press have no good tools to differentiate between "some person with a Ph.D said Y once" and "the vast majority of experts in this field are confident that X". You are quite right that real experts have a healthy feel for what they don't know - and often humility - but those are often very different things from those that worry people outside the field. All of those same experts could happily give you a list of things they and their colleagues have very good confidence in. It's almost always the right thing to do to accept these and move on. On the flip side any scientist will tell you there is small but real value at the margins for someone plugging away at a "crazy" theory. They are almost always wrong, but occasionally it turns up something really interesting. The trick is not to involve more people or too much resources, as these are long bets that will mostly fail.
Certhas 6y ago
> If you go read what the real experts in a field have to say... If you go to read what the real experts in the field have to say then you would learn that not a single one of them thought that the EM Drive had even the slightest chance of being true. In fact all the publications and work on EM Drive strictly avoided the real experts (physicists). They were all engineering journals. A paper that claims experimental evidence that overturns all physical theories from Newton onwards that's very telling isn't it?
greyhair 6y ago
I have always found that people that enjoy science are comfortable with uncertainty. I worked at Bell Labs for 16 years from the mid 1980s through 2000, and I found a lot of people still looking at things that "we all understand" and still wondering about how it really worked. Science is never 'settled'. There is the current understanding of the art, but that current understanding is not always fulfilling. There are edges and holes in most domains in science where people are poking around wondering how it really works. A lot of the things I implemented as an engineer (I am not a scientist, but I worked with scientists) were attempts to answer questions. Many of them having to do with "how do we measure this thing, without touching it?" Modeling information and making decisions based on observations against what you were expecting to observe.

jacquesm 6y ago

This sort of argument is routinely used to dismiss the laws of thermodynamics as merely 'theories' and to then move on to the most outrageous violations of known physical law. We are pretty sure of what we are sure of and we are pretty sure of what we aren't sure of, impressions notwithstanding. Science is a method, not a set of facts, and it has a built in mechanism to allow greater insights to replace lesser ones. As long as we stick to science we'll one day find the limits of what is knowable.

marvin 6y ago
I don't think you and GP are in disagreement. The scientific method to let greater insights replace lesser ones is precisely to try and fail at falsifying observations that violate known physical laws. No physical law is holy for this purpose, although scientists will necessarily have heuristics for what presumed observations they consider good enough to examine closer. Evidently, the EmDrive observations made the threshold! And now we know for sure. Well, close enough, anyway.
Aeolun 6y ago
> As long as we stick to science we'll one day find the limits of what is knowable. I’m rather inclined to believe the opposite. That if we stick to science, we never will.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Feel free to go to aromatherapy, crystals, alchemy, astrology, free energy, ley lines, quackery and so on. I'll be on the other side of this debate and I'll stick to science. It has worked better than any other mechanism that we've thought of to-date to give us actionable insights as well as a ton of abstract knowledge.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Huh? I was more trying to imply that there are probably no limits to what is knowable. Or at least, if we stay scientific, we should never believe we’ve reached the limits.
raverbashing 6y ago
> it has a built in mechanism to allow greater insights to replace lesser ones. As long as we stick to science Well you're not sticking to science when you assume any non-explained phenomenon is "impossible" and dismiss it outright. Science has a long list of "impossibles" that have been proven to be possible. Though of course that list was mostly of phenomenon we couldn't ignore. Saying "EMdrive is impossible given our current knowledge therefore it is not worth measuring" is tautological! Electricity and magnetism were seen as separate phenomenon as well and it seems a lot of people would be opposed to even try to put a compass next to a wire! The only thing I know is that the skeptics don't get the Nobel Prizes. Good, they measured, and as expected, no thrust. Cool.
- JackFr 6y ago
  What makes this article so refreshing and so compelling is that they replicated the NASA results, and then explained and eliminated them. Another "We don't see anything and it's impossible anyway so you guys are idiots or charlatans" would not be helpful. This is.
- Brian_K_White 6y ago
  Just because nothing is 100% knowable ultimately, doesn't mean all unknowns are equal. Everyone who doesn't want to invest 10000 human lives and a small countries total resources trying to find out if maybe oxidization isn't really exothermic but just somehow always looks that way (is fire hot?), isn't guilty of being incurious or religious. Come on now.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  Part of the problem is that it's much easier to come up with a new perpetual motion machine or reactionless drive concept than to prove that it doesn't work. After seeing them all fail, at a certain point people are going to stop paying them any attention. Oh, this time it uses X force in Y configuration? Go away until you have data, we could be more profitably spending time on just about anything else.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
jchrisa 6y ago
There is a strong argument to be made that there is no scientific method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism
- sixstringtheory 6y ago
  Can’t say I agree with the idea, but it’s certainly interesting to consider and at the least should help strengthen or discard a few assumptions! I think he’s conflating the process with all the other human factors involved. Sure, Galileo maybe did some shady stuff to convince people of his arguments. But that in no way makes a telescope stop working the way it does.
- oceanplexian 6y ago
  If you want to go down a rabbit hole, Nonlinear dynamics is another way to understand science. Many systems operate from a different paradigm of causality; it happens in biology, also common in fields like weather prediction where a large dataset is analyzed for patterns and then hypotheses are driven off the data in the opposite direction. This has caused some controversy in the scientific community because researchers have been caught using the methodology to "reverse engineer" hypotheses without disclosure, effectively gaming the system.
perl4ever 6y ago
"A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts." (Albert Einstein) "The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." (Sir Arthur Eddington)
ipaddr 6y ago
As plato would say the wall is choosing to hold us up. We may not understand why but it continues this way. At any point this could change. It wasn't until the theory of gravitation that we were able to define our obvervation as a general law. "Newton's law of universal gravitation is usually stated as that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers" This is still a law. We haven't proved this to be true even though it looks to be true. Laws can get superseeded. The phlogiston theory is a superseded scientific theory that postulated the existence of a fire-like element called phlogiston (/flɒˈdʒɪstən, floʊ-, -ɒn/)[1][2] contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory Another example is Luminiferous Aether https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether They are just theories in the end where most are probably correct somewhat.

techdragon 6y ago

Thank you for more eloquently expressing a sentiment that I have harboured for some time. After quoting the relevant Cave Johnson quote from PORTAL 2 so many times... it clicked and I came to the realisation that there is only one way to “do science” you “throw it at the wall and see if it sticks”. At a fundamental level, you must throw your results at the wall of publication and see if they stick, the only way science sticks is when it can be replicated by others. It remain on the wall! When people’s refutation of things like the em-drive is simply “this can’t work” my response is “prove it” not because I believe, but because “can’t work” just isn’t science, science is done by proving that something “does not work”. That means for something like the em-Drive you prove it doesn’t do what it claims, you prove it by replication and better measurement... and you learn how to build things better, learn how to measure better and that’s the value of these efforts! Or you prove it by detailed non destructive analysis of the experiment apparatus and prove your work by detailed physical simulation, publishing your code to prove you didn’t make any mistakes yourself! You cannot just give the answer you must show your work if you expect to go around calling what you do “science”. Providing such proof is not a waste, or bad science, it is the very essence of science itself.

jacquesm 6y ago
You are missing a very important part of how science is done: science starts with a hypothesis, the refutation or confirmation of that hypothesis is done by experiment. Plenty of science has been locked into the theoretical phase for decades before experimental verification could be obtained. If all we did was experiments we'd surely find some interesting stuff but without theory to guide where to do the next set of experiments science would be very inefficient. It's the closing of the loop that powers this tremendous progress you see from the renaissance to today. Without that we'd be stuck in alchemy, astrology and other pseudo sciences.
- electrograv 6y ago
  Science must find a balance between extremes in how experimental resources are invested: Extreme “Exploitation” Bias: “For maximally economical progress, experimental physics must strictly stay within the hard boundaries established by theoretical frameworks.” Extreme “Exploration” Bias: “For maximally fundamental progress, experimental physics must question all theoretical assumptions and boundaries with extreme suspicion.” It makes sense to diversify the kind of experimental investments we make along this risk/reward or exploration/exploitation spectrum. There are unique dangers if we weight too heavily on either extreme.

karmelapple 6y ago

> The kind of people who like science are often the kind of people who crave certainty. Just to clarify - are you implying scientists crave certainty, or non-scientists who enjoy reading about science crave certainty? The life scientists I know are the people in my life who are the most comfortable with uncertainty, or at least can recognize how uncertain the world can be. Perhaps they crave quantifying the uncertainty? But they certainly understand, respect, and live with uncertainty.

snowwrestler 6y ago
I took it to mean the fans of science who pile into forums like HN with expressive enthusiastic skepticism, the kind of people who think experimental physics is like working on a car.
jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 6y ago
> Just to clarify - are you implying scientists crave certainty, or non-scientists who enjoy reading about science crave certainty? Mostly the latter, but also the former to some degree. The scientists holding the status quo are often the most resistant to a paradigm shift.

kosievdmerwe 6y ago

Scientism. The deification of scientists and our current models. Which is ironic as we know our models are wrong somehow as we can't mesh Quantum mechanics and general relativity. There is clearly some undiscovered idea or principal. Science is about the process not about the body of knowledge we amassed. Science is about doing experiments to poke at the gaps of our knowledge. Not to like the Ancient Greeks debate our way to truth or worse declare something false based clearly on our flawed understanding.

supernovae 6y ago
Do you really believe this? Celebrity scientists aren't deified... in fact, they have a tough life because people assume they're all knowing. Look at our man Neil DeGrasse who called a Bull a Cow because where he lives in NYC everything is a cow and he got ripped by other scientists for being stupid. There is no universality to people period... i'm not sure why you feel its important to label some as "scientism" when there is no such thing as "scientism" with any universality.
- kosievdmerwe 6y ago
  Scientists aren't deified because people assume they're all knowing? As for scientism, there's a lot of people in this thread who essentially said "We could have known it wouldn't work by basic application of conservation of momentum". Or some other principal held to the standard of absolute truth. Our knowledge of the world is faulty and incomplete. All scientific knowledge is subject to tweaking or replacement based on experimental evidence. Not the other way around. We have models and guesses of how the world works, we don't have its source code.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Actually the whole point why this EM drive is interesting actually is that the measurements contradicted conservation of momentum. Otherwise having a small effect not contradicting any established physics is basically worthless.

supernovae 6y ago

The framing of "science becomes like a religion" is just projection, nothing else... For many of us, we just accept that science is, what it is, and its the facts we know at this time. That doesn't mean unwavering absolute faith as implied by saying it's religious, it's just we don't feel the need to have knowledge be anything else other than knowledge that we continuously build upon. Of course in general, lots of scientists know much more than other scientists and there is always bickering, people who have their identities married to it and so much more - but often times those very same people are often religious too so i question if the religiosity argument really exists or if its merely weaponized by people who fear the comfort of others who are ok with science without faith.

knodi 6y ago
well everything is a people thing because we’re people. What science offers is proof and data that can be reproduced. So no two scientists bickering is not the same as two theologian.
- supernovae 6y ago
  but to those who believe in theology it would appear as such...
twodave 6y ago
I appreciate the nuance here. As a person of faith one of the things I love most about both science and religion is the sheer amount of mystery there is in all of it. If there were no mystery in either, science would be dead and faith would be unnecessary. Yet science and religion pretend to be opposed. Throughout history the greatest clashes between faith and science have occurred when scientific understanding threatens the faith-based assumptions of the age. Imagine Abraham arguing with God over his request to sacrifice Isaac. Instead, he reasoned that God would find another way. Sometimes our understanding of religion limits our thinking with regard to not just science, but our faith as well.
plutonorm 6y ago
I'm an atheist. I also have a degree in comp sci a degree in Mathematics and a master's degree in mathematics. I read arxiv daily. I love science, I read constantly. Watching the cutting edge of science from afar is a passion of mine. I like to try to hold a holistic vision of it all in my head - an impossible task, but it keeps me busy. So, I'm not an enemy of science, I just dislike people harping on about 'impossible' from behind their keyboards when they have little more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject at hand and too high an opinion of authority.

ska 6y ago

> This idea that we are so sure of everything is pervasive I think this is a common misconception made mostly by people who distrust science as a whole, but not really broadly held. I don't know anyone who understands an area of science at any depth who holds such a view. The really broad problem is that in science there are things we have very high confidence in, and there are things we have very little confidence in but are the best working models currently - and everything in between. However, communication about where the confidence lies is often poorly done. Many observers who mostly hear about things through the lay press have no good tools to differentiate between "some person with a Ph.D said Y once" and "the vast majority of experts in this field are confident that X". You are quite right that real experts have a healthy feel for what they don't know - and often humility - but those are often very different things from those that worry people outside the field. All of those same experts could happily give you a list of things they and their colleagues have very good confidence in. It's almost always the right thing to do to accept these and move on. On the flip side any scientist will tell you there is small but real value at the margins for someone plugging away at a "crazy" theory. They are almost always wrong, but occasionally it turns up something really interesting. The trick is not to involve more people or too much resources, as these are long bets that will mostly fail.

Certhas 6y ago

> If you go read what the real experts in a field have to say... If you go to read what the real experts in the field have to say then you would learn that not a single one of them thought that the EM Drive had even the slightest chance of being true. In fact all the publications and work on EM Drive strictly avoided the real experts (physicists). They were all engineering journals. A paper that claims experimental evidence that overturns all physical theories from Newton onwards that's very telling isn't it?

greyhair 6y ago

I have always found that people that enjoy science are comfortable with uncertainty. I worked at Bell Labs for 16 years from the mid 1980s through 2000, and I found a lot of people still looking at things that "we all understand" and still wondering about how it really worked. Science is never 'settled'. There is the current understanding of the art, but that current understanding is not always fulfilling. There are edges and holes in most domains in science where people are poking around wondering how it really works. A lot of the things I implemented as an engineer (I am not a scientist, but I worked with scientists) were attempts to answer questions. Many of them having to do with "how do we measure this thing, without touching it?" Modeling information and making decisions based on observations against what you were expecting to observe.