Posted on 12/13/2004 2:48:24 PM PST by swilhelm73
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman
I agree.
I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
I used to be an avid reader of Scientific American, but it's turned into such a biased rag I can't stand it any more.
To be quite honest, I lost patience with it halfway through. The game wasn't worth the candle. I did, however, identify where he went grossly stupid:
The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science.
I had to laugh out loud at this one. Similarly, Franklin's definition of the proton's charge as positive and the electron's as negative is not testable, therefore electromagnetism is not science.
More importantly, Crichton doesn't seem to realize that the Drake equation is a heuristic device, rather than a theory. It doesn't make predictions, so what is there to test? It's just a way of defining terms, of giving names to the quantities we don't know. I wonder: does Crichton actually doubt that these quantities have values, or that when multiplied together their product equals the number of civilizations?
I also got a chuckle out of how Crichton heaped contumely on the TTAPS study on grounds that it was not testable, and then went on to say that the final refutation of the study was that it failed to predict the climatological effects of the Kuwaiti oil fires.
Any time 'science' abandons basic principloes -- like reproducibility of results --in favor of consensus of opinion, it has ceased to be 'science'.
I just slogged through the January issue of Scientific American, (yes, I still subscribe) and it fairly reeks of the sort of 'junky science' Crichton writes about in this article. If you have access to a copy, take a look at the full-page illustration on page 85 and, please, tell me WTH that stupid graphic has to do with anything remotely resembling science...
(FWIW, I did check sciam.com to see if the stupid image was online -- but the website is still stuck on the December issue.) What I did find was a headline about "ultrasound" on the sun -- and an article about vibrations at 100 milli hertz. Last time I checked, millihertz frequencies were in the Infra (not "ultra") sound range...
Junky, junky, junky "science", indeed!
principloes
My fat fingers frequently provide more letters than you pay for... '-}
Sagan was one of those people who, like Isaac Asimov (my childhood hero), I may have disagreed strongly about in certain political areas, but who I nonetheless had profound respect for. He tried his best at communicating science to the public, and except when he confounded scientific fact with personal opinion, did a damn good job in my estimation.
It seems to me Asimov was much better at seperating his personal views from science. I don't remember him making the kind of crackpot statements that Sagan did on occassion, though I will admit it is possible I somehow missed it.
The Sagan Equation is bunk. I could just as easily posit that at least 300 grains of sand out of all the world's beaches should be able to dance the Lindy like Michigan J. Frog and sing "Hello Ma Baby".
Sorry for not getting on earlier, will post later today.
What Sagan equation? Do you mean the Drake equation? If so, you are mistaken.
BTTT!!!!!!!
Great!!
Yes, I do. And I am not mistaken because I have not been proven to be mistaken yet. If there are any "communicative" civilizations out there squeezed out of the end of the Drake Equation, they have been spectacularly uncommunicative so far. Show me one, and I'll shut up and go away.
You are misinterpreting what the Drake Equation is trying to tell you.
Examples that come to mind are Schrödinger's Cat, the "inflating balloon" illustration of inflation or Hubble expansion, and the Bohr model of the atom (disproven as a viable model but still taught). These heuristic devices, in contrast to the Drake equation, are used to relate abstract mathematical concepts to more easily understood physical examples. That is their most important use, IMHO, but they carry the danger that people become beguiled by--and base objections on--irrelevant details of the illustrations, rather than grasp their salient points. (What if someone hears the cat meow? What is the balloon expanding into, and what if you're inside the balloon? Why aren't atoms flat like the solar system? etc.)
Some of the more far-out people in my area (rhetoric of science) tend to view all scientific expressions and equations as "giving names to things we don't know."
I don't think that's tenable. Consider the equation for rest mass energy, E=mc²: energy (E) is what we measure with a calorimeter, the speed of light (c) is what we measure with rulers and clocks; mass (m) is the ratio of force (measured by springs, for example) to acceleration (measured by clocks and rulers). All of these things are already independently known, or at least named unambiguously. Given these quantities, relation E=mc² is testably either right or wrong.
I found one stab at a definition for the Drake Equation at http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/drake_equation.html. It claims that the equation was developed "as a way to focus on the factors which determine how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in our galaxy." And since I have not heard of any "intelligent, communicating civilizations" other than our own as of yet (and do not look at all good in tinfoil), I do not see how I could be misinterpreting it. The final, crucial, stated condition has not been proven, therefore it is bunk.
Don't get me wrong - I would be happy if ET were found someday. But he hasn't been so far, and I do not believe he ever will be.
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