nobahar said:
Whats this got to do with anything? You almost sound like you're trying to be condescending to Newton (which is laughable!)
Condescending to Newton is laughable? So condescending to
other people is...?
Tell me, what makes you think one must be condescending to mention that a given branch of study had not been recognised in the days of Newton? Or Laplace? (Oh yes, BTW it
was Laplace; I checked!) That is not at all the same as saying how silly those old fogies must have been, not to have thought of such things for themselves!
Look nobahar, I
never patronise
anyone unless I am angry enough to be very rude, and not often then. I am not angry now, nor when I was writing my previous note. You are being pointlessly rude, and it does not seem to be making you very cheerful.
Think of this. When this discussion began I had addressed Ophiolite about a remark that I thought too good to reserve for geology, and you will note that he never saw fit to bite me. It is an example that you could bear in mind whether you follow it or not.
Now, whether one of us owes the other any more apologies than the other way around, I leave you to think over. When I first read this thread I did not realize that you were a youngster. Sorry about that, but as I remember it, I never noticed where you pointed that out. If I had, I would have been more careful to avoid some words that most of the mature people in forum would have understood without my explaining them.
Do you think I would I have done that because I thought you were too stupid to understand jargon? Or because I wanted to show you up? Certainly not. For one thing, I think it a good thing for youngsters to join and talk along. And if they learn from it and enjoy, it is not just a good thing, but a great reward all round, both to those that have passed on an idea and those that have been enriched. In fact it can be very difficult to predict which way round that happens.
But since I did not know, I used the words of hurry and short-cutting. While we are quoting great Frenchmen, Pascal is the earliest source I can find for "I have made this letter longer than usual, because I I lack the time to make it short," though something of the type is attributed to about a dozen other writers. Well, one could write something vaguely analogous about jargon, say: "I have used the usual jargon because I did not realize that it was time to speak English."
Well, that is why I did so, more or less.
So, it was all my fault? Possibly, but I have actually spoken to young people before, and made myself understood first time. But those were usually when I knew that I was not speaking to professionals.
What's that got to do with it? I never mentioned "proving things". I think your just 'one of those people'.
If you know that something "invariably happens", you can use that knowledge as the basis for certain types of proof. Right? See the connection?
Yes, we don't know whether the theory of evolution is absoultely 100% correct, just like you can never truly be an athiest (if your a rational person). What does that have to do with invariably?
nobahar, atheism is a religion. How it got into this discussion, I don't follow. Don't bother to explain unless you have a real cruncher of an argument to connect it to science on the one hand, and invariable prediction on the other.
As for evolution, be very, very careful. Certain subjects are very treacherous. They are based on simple facts and principles, so anyone with half a brain can read them and say something like: "Oh I see! That is obvious! Now I understand that subject!" Then they lead you into pitfall after pitfall. Only the experts get to see just how many kinds of pitfall are waiting, and that is because they have been caught out so many times that they no longer are embarrassed when it happens. Elementary probability theory is one such subject. Evolution ("Darwinism" to be more precise) is another. Trust me, you did yourself no favours with your remark about evolution.
You can predict what's going to happen, that doesn't mean you have to know for a fact what causes it. I could drop a ball and know all the necessary 'factors', and I could say that its going to drop to the ground and predict the time it takes. It doesn;t mean the theory of gravity is true, but it doesn't stop me from predicting exactly what's going to happen, everytime, invariably. Thats my point, and I even said that it doesn't apply to everything.
Does it apply to
anything? You are missing whole fields of scientific philosophy and other whole fields of scientific practice. I had to catch myself from beginning to name some; I really am rather short of time and you seem to be a bit short on tolerance at the moment. If ever you get interested enough, feel welcome to contact me and ask for a few pointers to useful reading matter. One excellent site to surf would be
http://plato.stanford.edu/
Some marvellous books would be the collected mathematical recreations and essays of the late (deeply) lamented Martin Gardner.
As I said in the original post, I don't know much about ocean trench formation, it doesn't mean that I should immediately assume that it's unpredictable; in fact, it seems like it should be the opposite (and some would agree, as previous posts suggest).
Hm... some gave you some helpful and informed discussion, but none gave you everything, which is precisely why it is so useful in these threads to have helpful people chipping into amplify each other's remarks or put them into broader and deeper perspectives. The privilege of being able to call on them so easily is something more valuable than you could easily imagine. I haven't got over it myself.
Isn't a fundamental principle of science repeatability? The same outcomes are necessary.
Here I rather unusually put my foot down with a clang!
NO! It is
NOT! (At least two clangs in fact, as you can see!) It is arguable to what extent we can achieve repeatability in any branch of science at any time, and how we would define it if we could. Let me know if this strikes you as hard to imagine. In Earth sciences, Biological sciences and applied sciences in general, this is particularly true, but ultimately it applies to the lot. (Again, here we also run into the problem of abstraction, in which we decide how to strip out the parts that we may "safely" ignore. But we also run into a lot of huge logical and philosophical problems. If those are not to your taste, ignore them... for now ...
Oh, and don't try and be patronising, your not five-years-old and it's extremely doubtful that your as intelligent as you think. You didn't have to contribute to the thread, others have contributed something constructive, you didn't.
Now, in case I did not make the point clear enough, I am very keen for you to continue reading and asking questions in blogs of this type. It is unusual in young people and suggests that you are intelligent. It is well to develop a good mind by being mentally predatory from as young as possible. For example, your question in this thread was a good one. But cool it. There is not a great deal you can learn while you are having conniptions.
Go well,
Jon
) thought that he could predict or retrodict every state of the universe, given enough precise starting information. (I don't know how much thought he gave to N-body problems!) But then he didn't know about chaotic systems, did he? Nor even thermodynamics and information theory.
