Can the science really be settled? Over recent years we’ve heard more and more arguments about how settled the science might be according to one’s own perspectives, data sets, and ideological inclinations.
Science is supposed to be challenged, questioned, tested, and scrutinized.
That’s the entire point.
If that isn’t permissible and the basic lines of inquiry are censored or taboo, then it’s not science, but secular dogma.
The science is settled is an unscientific statement.
Without challenge and disagreement science never advances. Newton, Einstein, and Galileo are all good examples of pushing against the so-called settled science.
The people who think questioning the science is wrong or hateful, are the same people who bought into the bill of goods we’ve all come to know as science fiction.
It’s all right that we ignore those people. Newton, Einstein, and Galileo didn’t listen to them, and neither should we, because Newton, Einstein, and Galileo have already proven that the science can never be settled.
Even Newton’s law of viscosity was challenged:
As an example of non-settled science, there were those who continued the scientific process by questioning Newton’s law of viscosity.
A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that does not follow Newton’s law of viscosity, i.e. viscosity is not constant and it’s a function of the stress applied.
Although the concept of viscosity is commonly used in fluid mechanics to characterize the shear properties of a fluid, it can be inadequate to describe non-Newtonian fluids. They are best studied through several other rheological properties that relate stress and strain rate tensors under many different flow conditions—such as oscillatory shear or extensional flow—which are measured using different devices or rheometers. The properties are better studied using tensor-valued constitutive equations, which are common in the field of continuum mechanics.
As we progress, we may even discover that the current climate sciences of the day might be inadequate to describe the actual climate processes that surround us and as with any other discipline (Newton’s law of viscosity), climate science should be challenged in order to bring a better understanding of just how dynamic our earth can really be.
Often we use terms today that no one ever really gives a second thought to.
Here are a few of those terms and their original uses.
Dirt poor
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt – hence the saying “dirt poor.” The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing.
Thresh hold
As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until when you opened the door it would start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance way, – hence the saying a “thresh hold.”
… of particular note:
The average Middle Ages houses were extremely small and housed the entire family. They rarely had completed floors, many of them having dirt or straw floors that added to the dampness. Most homes only consisted of a couple of rooms in which the entire family resided. This was not only their sleeping quarters, but their cooking, resting, and area in which they had family time.
Most family time was extremely limited since most of the homes of peasants contained both the parents and the children, the whole family worked in order to help support the entire family. This meant that it was generally early to bed and early to rise, and left little time in between to try and work on their schooling or bond with their family.
You go talk to kindergartners or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. They ask deep questions. They ask, “What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?” These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them. You go talk to 12th graders and there’s none of that. They’ve become incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade. – Carl Sagan
I always enjoyed watching Carl Sagan. He had a way of presenting science in new and interesting ways. He imagined the possibilities.
Kids these days aren’t taught to imagine the possibilities.
They aren’t taught to question.
They aren’t taught to think.
Our modern society has turned daydreaming into a medical condition that requires the dispensing of drugs in order to benefit the bottom line of big pharma.
Our modern society has turned free thinking into some bizarre sort of political angst that only the government can solve with more money.
Carl Sagan was brilliant, and I’m pretty sure that he would be turning in his grave if he were to see what our modern society has turned his beloved science into these days.
Education (as well as science) these days has been polluted with opinions, ideologies, and the never ending diatribe of political discourse.
Like Carl Sagan, I too went to school, 1st-12th grade, without the influence of the Department of Education. The Department of Education was created by President Carter as more of an afterthought … because he owed unions a favor.
Carl Sagan, like most of us pre-Dept of Ed, noticed the decline in education, and spoke out about it fairly frequently.
Carl Sagan wasn’t a prophet … he was a scientist. His science was such that saw what was coming, and he wrote about it.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
– Carl Sagan
Sagan continues:
“The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number one video cassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. Beavis and Butthead remains popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning – not just of science, but of anything – are avoidable, even undesirable.”
– Carl Sagan
Sagan chides mainstream media for their role in social engineering. The media has the greatest influence on our society, and it is in the ivory towers of media executives where the direction is set for our national intellect. They are the captains of our collective rational and emotional destiny, and Sagan’s comment condemns their fruitful efforts to turn young minds away from reason and towards stupidity.
Carl Sagan was a classical liberal — It was important to him that people got along and played nice. It’s most unfortunate that classical liberalism has gone the way of science and education in this country.
Classical liberalism, science, and education have suffered irreparable harm over the past 30 years, and it won’t be long ’till we’re staring the dark ages square in the face.
Carl Sagan, in an effort to keep things in perspective always seemed to look at the bigger picture (I might suggest that we do the same), and with that, I’ll leave you with his Pale Blue Dot — Listen to the words carefully and thoughtfully:
Astronomer Carl Sagan graduated from the University of Chicago, where he studied planets and explored theories of extraterrestrial intelligence. He was named director of Cornell’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies in 1968 and worked with NASA on several projects. An anti-nuclear activist, Sagan introduced the idea of “nuclear winter” in 1983. He wrote one novel, several books and academic papers and the TV series Cosmos, which was reborn on TV in 2014.
Young couple elope from New York and come to Twodot on honeymoon
Harlowton News:
For the past week, social circles in the hospitable town of Twodot have been taxed to the limit to pay homage to Mr. and Mrs. Gillette Wells, an eloping couple, just arrived from Corning, New York. The romantic pair are the guests of Mr. and Mrs. E. F. Baxter, who are old friends of the families of both the bride and the groom back in the Empire State. Parties, receptions, and balls have been run off in a rapid and endless succession, and it has been many years since the town has been so stirred with social pleasure.
The story of the courtship, elopement, and marriage of the young couple is truly romantic. The home of the bride, who is about 18 years of age, is in Corning, near the east end of Lake Erie. Her father is a wealthy glass merchant. The groom, 20 years of age, also lives near Corning; his father is a well-known banker and financier. For several years, young Wells has been attending college and, during his studies, he has been able to save about $5,000 out of his school allowances. Strict economy has enabled the bride also to lay aside a snug sum.
The young people were invited out one evening to a party given at a neighbor’s house. But the couple never arrived. Wells informed his friends that his sweetheart had taken ill suddenly.
Late that same night, the happy pair hied themselves to Buffalo and from there into Canada, where they were married. They left on the next train for the west and arrived in Twodot the first of the week. They were looking for a small town in which to hide while spending their honeymoon, at the same time enjoying the hospitality that their station demanded. Twodot has proven to be the ideal spot.
The parents of the elopers are ignorant of the couple’s whereabouts, and it is believed that the state of New York is being searched for the missing pair. Mr. Wells will leave for Helena shortly, and it is likely he will pitch his tent in Montana and try his lot in the land of the cowboy.
Archived issues are available in digital format from the Library of Congress Chronicling America online collection
Notes:
The first publication of the Roundup Record on April 3, 1908, coincided with the creation of the town of Roundup, Montana, inspired in large part by the arrival of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway in 1908. The newspaper’s first editor, Alfred W. Eiselein Sr., started the six-column, eight-page weekly at age 23 with $1,000, money he earned editing a newspaper in Danube, Minnesota, while still in his teens.
For much of the town’s history, two variant spellings of the town’s name were in use: “Two Dot” and “Twodot”. The name of the town’s post office was officially changed from Twodot to Two Dot in 1999.
However, when the community was listed as a census-designated place prior to the 2020 census, the U.S. Census Bureau used the name “Twodot”.
Peeking out from behind the glare of a bright foreground star, astronomers have uncovered the most extraordinary example yet of a nearby galaxy with characteristics that are more like galaxies in the distant, early universe. Only 1,200 light-years across, the tiny galaxy HIPASS J1131–31 has been nicknamed “Peekaboo” because of its emergence in the past 50-100 years from behind the fast-moving star that was obscuring astronomers’ ability to detect it.
The discovery is a combined effort of telescopes on the ground and in space, including confirmation by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Together the research shows tantalizing evidence that the Peekaboo Galaxy is the nearest example of the galaxy formation processes that commonly took place not long after the big bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
“Peekaboo” Dwarf Galaxy HIPASS J1131–31 (tap or click image to enlarge)
“Uncovering the Peekaboo Galaxy is like discovering a direct window into the past, allowing us to study its extreme environment and stars at a level of detail that is inaccessible in the distant, early universe,” said astronomer Gagandeep Anand of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, co-author of the new study on Peekaboo’s intriguing properties.
Astronomers describe galaxies like Peekaboo as “extremely metal-poor” (XMP). In astronomy, “metals” refers to all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The very early universe was almost entirely made up of primordial hydrogen and helium, elements forged in the big bang. Heavier elements were forged by stars over the course of cosmic history, building up to the generally metal-rich universe humans find ourselves in today. Life as we know it is made from heavier element “building blocks” like carbon, oxygen, iron, and calcium.
While the universe’s earliest galaxies were XMP by default, similarly metal-poor galaxies have also been found in the local universe. Peekaboo caught astronomers’ attention because, not only is it an XMP galaxy without a substantial older stellar population, but at only 20 million light-years from Earth it is located at least half the distance of the previously known young XMP galaxies.
Australia’s iconic 64-meter (210 ft) Parkes radio telescope (tap or click image to enlarge)
Peekaboo was first detected as a region of cold hydrogen more than 20 years ago with the Australian Parkes radio telescope Murriyang, in the HI Parkes All Sky Survey by professor Bärbel Koribalski, who is an astronomer at Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and a co-author of the latest research study on Peekaboo’s metallicity. Far-ultraviolet observations by NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission showed it to be a compact blue dwarf galaxy.
“At first we did not realize how special this little galaxy is,” Koribalski said of Peekaboo. “Now with combined data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), and others, we know that the Peekaboo Galaxy is one of the most metal-poor galaxies ever detected.”
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was able to resolve about 60 stars in the tiny galaxy, almost all of which appear to be a few billion years old or younger. Measurements of Peekaboo’s metallicity by SALT completed the picture. Together, these findings underline the major difference between Peekaboo and other galaxies in the local universe, which typically have ancient stars that are many billions of years old. Peekaboo’s stars indicate that it is one of the youngest and least-chemically-enriched galaxies ever detected in the local universe. This is very unusual, as the local universe has had about 13 billion years of cosmic history to develop.
However, the picture is still a shallow one, Anand says, as the Hubble observations were made as part of a “snapshot” survey program called The Every Known Nearby Galaxy Survey – an effort to get Hubble data of as many neighboring galaxies as possible. The research team plans to use Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope to do further research on Peekaboo, to learn more about its stellar populations and their metal-makeup.
“Due to Peekaboo’s proximity to us, we can conduct detailed observations, opening up possibilities of seeing an environment resembling the early universe in unprecedented detail,” Anand said.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
RELEASE: NASA, ESA, STScI
December 06, 2022 Release ID: 2022-051
Can the science really be settled?
Can the science really be settled? Over recent years we’ve heard more and more arguments about how settled the science might be according to one’s own perspectives, data sets, and ideological inclinations.
Science is supposed to be challenged, questioned, tested, and scrutinized.
That’s the entire point.
If that isn’t permissible and the basic lines of inquiry are censored or taboo, then it’s not science, but secular dogma.
Without challenge and disagreement science never advances. Newton, Einstein, and Galileo are all good examples of pushing against the so-called settled science.
The people who think questioning the science is wrong or hateful, are the same people who bought into the bill of goods we’ve all come to know as science fiction.
It’s all right that we ignore those people. Newton, Einstein, and Galileo didn’t listen to them, and neither should we, because Newton, Einstein, and Galileo have already proven that the science can never be settled.
Even Newton’s law of viscosity was challenged:
As an example of non-settled science, there were those who continued the scientific process by questioning Newton’s law of viscosity.
See video below:
A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that does not follow Newton’s law of viscosity, i.e. viscosity is not constant and it’s a function of the stress applied.
Although the concept of viscosity is commonly used in fluid mechanics to characterize the shear properties of a fluid, it can be inadequate to describe non-Newtonian fluids. They are best studied through several other rheological properties that relate stress and strain rate tensors under many different flow conditions—such as oscillatory shear or extensional flow—which are measured using different devices or rheometers. The properties are better studied using tensor-valued constitutive equations, which are common in the field of continuum mechanics.
As we progress, we may even discover that the current climate sciences of the day might be inadequate to describe the actual climate processes that surround us and as with any other discipline (Newton’s law of viscosity), climate science should be challenged in order to bring a better understanding of just how dynamic our earth can really be.