Hollywood anti catholic bullshit needs to stop

[palou]

SpokenTruth said:

palou said:

There are things that CANNOT be trivialized sufficiently to a layman (which is pretty much everyone on the planet with the exception of a few hundred) without losing the very elements that constitute the arguments. I know that to be true for a large part of mathematics, and the extremely theoretical physics they are talking about are not all too different, in that regard. You can perhaps trivialize a concept, you most definitely can't trivialize the arguments. I do NOT think that it is a good practice to use bad arguments in the lack of being able to provide any good ones. I believe truth to be important. That involves accepting what you cannot know. Science isn'T a popularity contest, and shouldn't be treated as one.

 

And I most certainly cannot provide any aid on their debate of the validity of M-theory, or the big bounce, or etc... Firstly, of course, because it's not something that I know the intrinsics of; secondly, even if I knew them, there would be no way to explain an argument to them in less than a few years.

 

M theory/string theory really is no longer in a range of anything that can be simply visualized/illustrated in a way that seems natural, in which you can make any intuitive logical followings. Those simply don't exist in anything that abstract. Any conclusion you CAN make is math, pages and pages of it. There is, in fact, *NO ONE* that can make any statements as broadly as some statements that appeared in this thread. It's collective knowledge, that slowly transitions at each new incite. My father has done some collaboration in works on string theory. He does not understand string theory, or the small subconcept that was discussed in his paper. In fact, he can't comprehend half of the material of the paper that he collaborated on. He is an expert on maximal green sequences, a mathematical structure which appears in the problem, so he gives any incite that may be required regarding maximal green sequences. A colleague in physics is then able to make use of those results, to create results regarding *his* specialized structure, which in turn allows a third person to make conclusions based on that, etc... As a whole, hundreds of scientists can collectively build a sound web of logical conclusions which allows us to say certain things on the universe. Not a single person explain more than a couple steps within that web.

Palou, we are not trying to add new data to the theory, pass judgement on the merits of a theory or create a new theory.  We are simply discussing the theories on a macro level.  And those can be explained to the laymen if contextualized properly.  Black holes, big bang, string theory, observable universe, time dilation, relativity...all of them have a macro level conceptualization that can be discussed and understood by laymen.  The problem is that most of them have common misconceptions that are discussed just as much.  Just because the details of the theories are complex doesn't mean you cannot remove the macro level misconceptions about them in casual online conversation. 

Help me remove the misconceptions but don't ask us to remove the discussion. That only allows them to continue and spread.

The problem is that we present science as something infallible, a list of fully logical conclusions. This, so that. The problem is, on a macro level, that just isn't the case. And when discussing the topic with a religious person, for example, presenting a simplified version will hurt more than anything else. As we are presenting an explanation filled with missing links and logically dubious conclusions. It think the ideal way to convince someone of the validity of science is to have them fill a scientific protocol themselves, for a much simpler, more constrained problem, already solved, with all the necessary rigour needed to make an unquestionably logical conclusion. To comprehend why the conclusions made by the scientific community must necessarily be taken to be the most reasonable explanation of any phenomena.