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Forums - General - Is science too much about assumptions?

chapset on 19 December 2013
d21lewis said:
I was told that the only reason bullets go in straight lines is because you were told that's how they move. Truth is, you can curve a bullet. I saw a documentary where a guy curved a bullet and shot like four or five different people standing in a circle.

hahahahahaha





Bet reminder: I bet with Tboned51 that Splatoon won't reach the 1 million shipped mark by the end of 2015. I win if he loses and I lose if I lost.

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Soleron on 19 December 2013
existenz2 said:

I lost it at the speed of light is a constant when it you can see it bends in water.. if it bends it must slow down on the inside of the curve..!

Individual photons don't travel at less than the-speed-of-light. It's constant everywhere. Fact.

But considering the whole material, light waves and the information they carry appear to travel at the slower speed in water etc.

The mathematics is extremely well backed up. This is one of science's strongest facts you're attacking.



whatever on 19 December 2013

I can't explain it any better then Richard Feynman:

"The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess."



fps_d0minat0r on 19 December 2013
TheJimbo1234 said:
pauluzzz1981 said:

Let's get this clear. I love science. I'm reading alot about science, if i can understand it. But i was watching a program on discovery about the stars, dark matter, anti-materie and wormholes. I love the theories, but aren't they going too far? I was listening to a scientist, pressumably one of the smartest people of the world and he was talking nonsense. He was talking about alternate universes and that we can create them in the future with some device. My only question was, where do we leave another universe?

Look, i know, i'm not so smart and we need people with vision. But where is the line between interesting theory and woohoo??


Maths.

Their crazy ideas are backed up by solid maths.

HOWEVER, these ideas make vast amounts of assumptions which we have no idea are true or not. Mathmatically they are sound, but if you somehow mathmatically show the sky to be pink, that does not mean it will be.


Actually it would. The colour of the sky is blue because of the elements in our atmosphere are mostly oxygen and nitrogen. An increase in other elements can change the colour of the sky, so if you have a statistic that tells you a certain element will increase a certain percentage, you can predict the colour of the sky....ofcourse there is never a sudden change except when volcanos erupt, which may cause parts of the sky to change to colours such as green temporarily.

I believe this will also be the leading method to determine whether exoplenets have a habitable envrionment or not, once we get telescopes that are good enough.



theprof00 on 19 December 2013
d21lewis said:
archer9234 said:
d21lewis said:
I was told that the only reason bullets go in straight lines is because you were told that's how they move. Truth is, you can curve a bullet. I saw a documentary where a guy curved a bullet and shot like four or five different people standing in a circle.

Was the bullet altered in any way? Because Mythbsuters tested this a ton of times. And they never got  it to curve.



 

I can't believe nobody got this... kudos to you d21, and sorry your hilariousness went unappreciated. Made my day.



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BMaker11 on 19 December 2013
Soleron said:
existenz2 said:

I lost it at the speed of light is a constant when it you can see it bends in water.. if it bends it must slow down on the inside of the curve..!

Individual photons don't travel at less than the-speed-of-light. It's constant everywhere. Fact.

But considering the whole material, light waves and the information they carry appear to travel at the slower speed in water etc.

The mathematics is extremely well backed up. This is one of science's strongest facts you're attacking.

This gets a little semantical here. Light can't go "less than the speed of light" because it, itself, is light. A light photon can't move slower than itself. However, light can move slower than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, if you change the medium that light is going through. Gelatin, for example



Soleron on 19 December 2013
BMaker11 said:
...

This gets a little semantical here. Light can't go "less than the speed of light" because it, itself, is light. A light photon can't move slower than itself. However, light can move slower than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, if you change the medium that light is going through. Gelatin, for example

No. Photons never move slower than c, 300,000,000m/s

I can bet you a Steam game over this if you want.



BMaker11 on 19 December 2013
Soleron said:
BMaker11 said:
...

This gets a little semantical here. Light can't go "less than the speed of light" because it, itself, is light. A light photon can't move slower than itself. However, light can move slower than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, if you change the medium that light is going through. Gelatin, for example

No. Photons never move slower than c, 300,000,000m/s

I can bet you a Steam game over this if you want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index



Soleron on 19 December 2013
BMaker11 said:
Soleron said:
BMaker11 said:
...

This gets a little semantical here. Light can't go "less than the speed of light" because it, itself, is light. A light photon can't move slower than itself. However, light can move slower than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, if you change the medium that light is going through. Gelatin, for example

No. Photons never move slower than c, 300,000,000m/s

I can bet you a Steam game over this if you want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index

Show me proof from that article that photons travel at less than c



BMaker11 on 19 December 2013
Soleron said:
BMaker11 said:
Soleron said:
BMaker11 said:
...

This gets a little semantical here. Light can't go "less than the speed of light" because it, itself, is light. A light photon can't move slower than itself. However, light can move slower than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, if you change the medium that light is going through. Gelatin, for example

No. Photons never move slower than c, 300,000,000m/s

I can bet you a Steam game over this if you want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index

Show me proof from that article that photons travel at less than c

Dude...it's right in the first paragraph

"For example, the refractive index of water is 1.33, meaning that light travels 1.33 times slower in water than it does in vacuum."

Unless you're trying to say photons aren't light?