This morning's The Infinite Monkey Cage Christmas Special (on the subject of ghosts and ghost stories) inevitably began with a now bog-standard BBC quip from Robin Ince about 2016 being a terrible year (see yesterday), but who couldn't forgive our (Christmas) Robin for that when we also had this kind of thing?:
Neil deGrasse Tyson: But if I may broaden the concept of 'ghost'? As an astrophysicist it's not hard for me to think of stars that have long ago died whose light only just reaches us on Christmas Day telling us that they once did die. And that stream of light is a ghost, a kind of spirit energy of a last gasp of a star's life. So when I look up at the night's sky I know that some fraction of the stars I see are ghosts of a star that was once alive.Brian Cox: No, it's just photons.
And Nick Baines, the go-ahead Bishop of Leeds, shared a joke:
I was walking down the road and I saw a baby ghost on the pavement. On the other hand it could have been a handkerchief.
That sort of programme steers well clear of the rather unsettling fact that as science as progressed exponentially so the paradoxes and uncertainties regarding the origins of the cosmos and the way the laws of physics work at the microcosmic level have multiplied. With most sciences - let's say geology as an example - uncertainty doesn't increase as your knowledge increases.
ReplyDeleteTreating geology as the "serious" science by which to gauge the progress of "lesser" ones like physics seems a bit topsy turvey to me.
ReplyDeleteNo, not treating it as a gauge - treating it as a "science". In the 19th century materialist scientists (now rebranded as "physicalists") thought that science would lead to surer and surer knowledge. That was the consensus and remained so well into probably the second half of the 20th century. In that sense they saw no distinction between geology and physics or indeed psychology and physics.
DeleteIt's for scientists to explain why cosmology and particle physics seem to be generating thousands of contradictory theories rather than increasing certainty.
It's so ironic when people complain of "thousands of contradictory theories" which are increasingly uncertain, while using electronics created by the pretty precise knowledge we have of the atomic structure of semiconductors, etc.
DeleteI can only think of two theories which have a serious contradiction. Room for improvement but still not too bad so far...
Surely it's the ultimate embodiment of science? They admit they don't know everything but through experimentation they go on to prove or disprove each theory, and then come up with new ones if the old ones are proven to be incorrect. Admittedly some times this takes a generation with vested interests to pass before happening, but it does happen.
ReplyDeleteWritten on a Star Trek communicator / iPhone......
Completely agree. Perhaps the Scientific Method is after all the greatest achievement, rather than individual discoveries or theories, however momentous they might have been.
DeleteYes, except for 'Climate Science' which, of course, is settled. Denialists should be arrested.
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