What Religion Do You Follow?

[Dr.Grass]

highwaystar101 said:

Dr.Grass said:

Woah, long read. Yeah, I never meant to equate Noah's ark and Special Relativity! It is my belief that the Noah's ark story isn't the fact. 

I get your argument about predictions. This is exactly what the scientific model is based on, and it prevents science from straying too far from the truth.

''I agree, we should never dismiss an idea that sounds too fantastic to be true, we should always investigate it... Then we can decide whether we dismiss it or not.''

Here's a thought. Some of the most brillian men on the planet (including this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten) are so convinced of string theory that they keep working on it despite widespread mocking from many prominent physicists. Edward was once recorded as saying that String Theory must be true since because of its elegance. The important thing that I wanted to mention is that all these big guys know that String Theory cannot possibly be tested... Furthermore, just to give you an idea of what they believe:

An atom as you know is very, very, very small. To illustrate this:

In a single drop of water there are: 6 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 atoms.

Now, if you think that's small: If the nucleus of the atom were as big as a golf ball, then the atom would be a few kilometers (depending on the type of element) in diameter.

That's seriously small.

Now, in string theory all matter is made up of tiny vibrating strings. The type of vibration that the string has determines what type of particle (proton, neutron, electron, positron, muon, gluon...) is associated with it. So matter is just tiny strings of energy vibrating in the fabric of space-time.

Here comes the mind-job. If a string was the size of a regular tree, then an atom would be the size of...OUR SOLAR SYSTEM.

Ok, I got a bit carried away (being a physicist and all), but that's some hardcore sci-fi stuff right there!!!

Mmm, sorry about the long postI tend to get carried away too, so I know where you're coming from.

Anyway, I was trying to show how even though two ideas can both seem implausible, one can still be dismissed as fantasy whilst the other one is taken seriously. I was just using your examples. It could have equally been *Insert supported theory here* vs *insert unsupported theory here*.

As for string theory, it's certainly an interesting that it's essentially near impossible to provide evidence for, and perhaps it's an exception to my statement. However, it can still be falsified under certain conditions (say we find a serious fault with our current quantum theory for example), so we can decide to dismiss it if the knowledge it's based on is found to be in error in some way. Maybe it half meets my statement you quoted, I'll give you that at least.

I agree with that. You know, all I don't like is when people are so chauvinistic that they just dismiss everything religious because they ''adhere to science''. Usually these people know jack about science anyway. 

Mostly its very hard to reach a conclusion in an argument on these topics. I agree with what you say and understand why you pointed it out.

:)