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Wednesday, January 14, 2015

What is Science? It is not Scientism or the cult of Science.

Science is empirical, rational, replicable, factual.

by StFerdIII

 

What is science? Is it the metaphysical hand-waving of evolution? The outright fraud and nonsense of globaloneywarming? The science fiction of multi-universes, pregnant universes, impregnated by black holes and the whole universe suffused with the never proven 'dark matter'? Good grief.

Michael Crichton (1942–2008), who had a previous career in medicine and science, said:

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

Past dominant paradigms which were entirely fallacious and were little more than hand-waving philosophy included:

Epicycles: Belief that planetary rotations were perfectly circular and that the planets themselves were also a perfectly circular shape.

Phlogiston: A magic substance which explained how substances burned or became rusted. It does not exist.

Geocentricity: It appeared that the Earth is stationary and therefore the planets by default must circle around the stationary Earth.

Earth does not rotate: The somewhat common-sense observation that objects did not fly off the surface of the Earth led philosophers and scientists to assume that the Earth did not move. If it did, it was reasoned, no object would stay fastened to the surface. They would spin off.

Alchemy: Turning lead or some other base metal into gold. Whilst it is possible to create a gold leaf or gold shavings, material and physical properties do not change their composition from one material to another [this includes the melting of minerals to create for eg steel].

Humours: 4 basic fluids in the body corresponded to 4 basic 'humours' or moods. The idea was to keep these in balance. Such a paradigm retarded real medicine by millennia.

Spontaneous generation: Scientific consensus during the 'Enlightenment' held that mice and other rodents appeared from dirt, garbage, old shirts and dung.

Abiogenesis: Evolution maintains that life originated from non-matter, and that all life has non-life origins. This is patently absurd.

Life on the moon: The 'lunatics' were a group of famous astronomers who in the 19th century adamantly upheld that the moon had life.

Life on Mars: In the early 20th century Mars was deemed to be a planet with a similar climate as the Earth's. Fictitious 'canals' and other 'proofs' of civilization were constructed. It is of course dead cold.

Life on Venus: In the 1940s and early 50s the consensus was that Venus was the Earth's sister planet with a similar atmosphere and a good chance at having life. Venus is a red hot hell with a surface temp of 1000 F. It was Venus with its 95% Co2 atmosphere [vs the Earth's 4/100 of 1 %]...which gave rise to the scam of 'the greenhouse effect'...

 There is no settled science. There is no science when the theory is unproven, untested, and when it contains more philosophy and metaphysics than hard facts. So much for rationality and an 'age of reason' for any who argue the contrary.