Bijou Drains
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Good to see you’re back Birdy Boy
now perhaps you can get on with answering this (to recap)
Bijou Drains wrote: “Actually, practically everything in science can be sensed in a direct way…”
L Bird wrote: “We’ll have to agree to disagree, on this one, BD.
If I were to produce a list of ‘stuff’ from ‘science’, which neither of us, or anyone else, has even touched, etc., I’d be here till xmas!”
Bijou Drains wrote: “L Bird Touch is not the only sense, observation is through the sense of smell. So if you can list even ten “discoveries of science” that have not been based on things that have been sensed, including by observation I would be amazed. So off you go then, set yourself away.”
So come on, where’s your list?
The move to reopen universities was an absolutely appauling one. Newcastle has a student population of about 50,000 students, all based in halls of residence and houses in mutliple occupation, mainly around the city centre, it’s the same in many other cities. Liverpool has three Universities, Leeds two, Sheffield two, all with student s based close to city centres. I’m sure the decision was based on bailing our the Universities which are big businesses now, a lot of them have their own halls of residence which contribute to their running costs, they make money on all the campus bookshops, coffee bars, coke machines, etc. It’s even worse for small university cities like Durham, it has a population of 48,000 and about 20,000 students in attendance.
I was being sarcastic, to get some allies against the avian, Bijou.
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Well you soitenly fooled me, Stanley. BD plays with tie, straightens bowler hat and walks away into the distance
Bijou, I am a member of the party.
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Sorry TM, I just took it from the following contribution you made very early in ths thread, in response to L Bird that you were not a member of the party:
So humans decide, according to their class and time, how the planets move, whether a dropped fork will obey gravity, how suns are formed, and how far away they would like the sun to be?
The universe obeys mankind?
Did the universe exist before humans?And this is interesting, thank you.
I now know the view of the SPGB.
All best wishes.Apologies
Seeings as how this debate is going off on a tangent, a very interesting one, by the way. Can I go off on a tangent of my own?
TM you re clearly very familiar with the Party case, and from your postings it seems that you agree with what we say, you even refer to distributing our material. Have you ever thought of joining us? (you may well have been a member in the past) and following on from that, why don’t you join (rejoin)? We certainly could do with your help.
I was taking to a family member who is an anti vaxer recently and they made the comment, “what good have vaccines ever done?” Which sort of shows the level of the anti vaxer debate. It when a bit pythonesque, as I asked “you mean apart from the complete eradication of small pox, the almost complete eradication of diphtheria and polio, the massive suppression of TB, whooping cough, tetanus, mumps and rubella, the fall in the number of brain damaged children as a result of measles, the reduction in deaths as a result of the flu jab, apart from that not very much. “
I’ll be getting my flu jab, and if/when the Covid 19 vaccine is ready I’ll be first in the queue, litle old ladies, the disabled and the vulnerable will be lying in my wake as I get in first!
Am I now supposed to be supporting the Catholic Church because I pointed out some good things about the medieval Church?
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You want to be careful matey, there was another bloke called Thomas More who was saying positive things about the Catholic Church, look what happened to him!
It’s interesting that Andrew Wakefield is supported by one of the colleges of chiropractors, another bunch of evidence free schisters.
L. Bird has not replied to my question of what he thinks of Carl Sagan, Richard Leakey, Brian Cox etc. Are they bourgeois scientists and hence not to be esteemed by socialists? The same question applies to Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, Copernicus, etc.
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Sadly this is L Bird’s pattern, comes in hijacks the topic, throws around all kinds of ridiculous statements, and then when the going gets sticky and there are a few questions he can’t answer (he has studiously ignored one of mine in this thread) he buggers off.
His next move will be to come back in a few week’s time, claiming to have trounced the arguments of everyone on here and then start spouting he same horse shit all over again.
But in our kindly, tolerant, demcratic way, we let him get on with it. It’s a bit like having a stray cat that comes and shits in your garden, you know it’s a pest, you get sick of clearing up the shit, but if you haven’t seen it for a while you get a bit worried about whether or not it’s ok.
Getting back to the original point of this post all of the anti science bullshit out there, as well as the general atmosphere of being anti expert, I also think that a lot of this stuff is out there for financial reasons. If you look at the case of the proven fraudulent research carried out by Andrew Wakefield on Autism and the MMR jab, his motivation was to profit from the legal claims that would come from it. He has now gone to the States and is coining it in from publishing the same rubbish, but there is a gullible audience that will buy it. A lot of the conspiracy websites have advertising and other associated income streams, get a lot of traffic and your in the money.
There is a similar thing going on with football at the moment, sites set up to report spurious football transfers (Messi to Hartlepool United, etc. If your reading this Harley, it’s not true, sadly he’s not on his way to the Victoria Ground) which then make money when the click bait is responded to.
From the point of view of those who get lured into this nonsense, I think a big part of it for them, is the idea of being in on the know, that you know something that others don’t and that when you tell them you can bathe in the kudos it brings. It’s a bit like an elaborate version of knowing a bit of juicy gossip.
Wez “Bijou – I may be mistaken but weren’t Einstein’s theories of relativity entirely the result of ‘thought experiments’?”
the point is that the thought experiments he used were attempts to expain observable evidence that he sought to explain, without the observable phenomena, there was nothing to explain or attempt to understand. I wouldn’t have a reason to find an explanation for the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, if I haven’t observed something that might be a weasel under the cocktail cabinet
L Bird
Touch is not the only sense, observation is through the sense of smell. So if you can list even ten “discoveries of science” that have not been based on things that have been sensed, including by observation I would be amazed. So off you go then, set yourself away.
“Almost everything to do with ‘science’ can’t be sensed in such a direct way.”
Actually, practically everything in science can be sensed in a direct way, Hook’s Law, Boyle’s Law, etc, all the way through are based on sensory perceptions of measurement. When you use a spectrometer to measure the width of a sodium atom you are using your senses, aided by machines, but dependent upon your senses.
L Bird, I will go with you as for as the difference between “The World” and “Our World”. Our world is a growing development of interaction with each other and with the world we live in.
Not that very far from Piaget’s concept of schema, mental representations of the world as we understand it which transform as we encounter new experiences and challenges to our pre exisiting schema. The process being an ongoing process which is never complete.
I could also see to some extent that due to the fact that many of the key experiences that form schema are social experiences and as we share a degree of social experiences they are likely to be commonalities at any point in time, in any society.
However, and it is a big however, “our World” derives from somewhere, we discover as children that things that are hot burn us. We develop a schema around hot things that protects us. Our schema is not “The World” it is “our world”, but it is based on our encounters with external forces, forces of nature and social forces. Whilst we can change our internal representation of these forces to gain a more accurate schema (never getting to a point of complete accuracy), we cannot simply ignore these external forces. We cannot change “hot things burn my skin” to “hot things do not burn my skin” by our own creation, any more than the schizoid man can become Napolean, just because he wants to.
