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> Complete armchair novice here I basically came into the comments here just to see all the complete armchair novices come out of the woodwork to explain how t
by fknorangesite 5y ago
> Complete armchair novice here
I basically came into the comments here just to see all the complete armchair novices come out of the woodwork to explain how they think they're smarter than the actual physicists.
- rootusrootus 5y agoWelcome to HN, and every other forum on the Internet. It's a conversation forum, not a debate forum. Speaking of which, shall we start a discussion on climate science? ;-)
- fknorangesite 5y ago> Speaking of which, shall we start a discussion on climate science? ;-) Here's a Monty Hall explainer. Will a plane on a treadmill take off? When you shower, do you explicitly wash your legs? Did you know that 0.999...=1?
- kortex 5y agoI think dark matter (and dark energy, for the same reason) invite lots of armchair discussion by curious non-experts precisely because they are basically fudge factors. There's no ontological baggage and the theories are fairly "decoupled" from other aspects of physics. It's basically data, a fitted curve, and some X factor (or Lambda for dark energy) added on to make the data fit the curve. That X does not interact with any other models outside of cosmology in any currently observable way, and not for lack of searching. That makes it really tempting to think "well maybe it's the model/equation that's wrong", which has been exactly the case throughout scientific history: planet Vulkan vs Relativity, phlogiston vs oxygen, luminiferous ether vs QED.