Immediate upvote.

Australian schools are starting to teach philosophy whilst American schools are starting to teach creationism...

It's too bad that the people that absolutely NEED to see this (creationists, believers in intelligent design, and most of the republican evangelical christian conservative right-wing fundamentalists) Never Will. And, if by accident, they DO see this, they would never understand it.

Gravity... gravity...
gravity...

you never see gravity...

You never see anything....



We are slowly becoming idiots due to these sort of scientific simplifications. There is an ever growing gap between human experience and the theories we use to control nature, to predict.

Scratch Dawkins and you'll find a man searching for the key to the riddle of existence... and the answer is sadly lacking (even purely theoretical knowledge is power - it too corrupts)


On Exactitude in Science

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.


Jorge Luis Borges

^That's one of the most thoughtful comments I've read on here in a long while.

There is no answer to the riddle of existence, science is a method of thinking and a set of linguistic and mathematical tools for describing. Science is not a search for an ultimate truth that many (including a lot of cosmologists and physicists) seem to think it is.

It is not a search for "ultimate" truth, but it is a search for truth. When observable tests fail, that line of questioning is discarded. When tests succeed, that line of questioning is pursued further. Though truth itself cannot be quantified or perhaps even perfectly matched, it is the guide which science follows.

This cannot be said of "faith", which by definition only exists in the lack of evidence. It is claimed by many to be the realm of "ultimate" truth, but only because that can never actually be achieved. Any verifiable truth that comes out of religious sources becomes science, and loses any "spiritual" aspect it may have once held.

I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones

*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Friday, September 5th, 2008 4:52pm PDT - promote requested by LadyDeath.

There is no "ultimate truth", that's a religious concept... or at base a superstitious one. There just is stuff. When you start searching for the "why" you stop searching for the truth.

This whole spherical world thing is a theory! Have you ever seen the world from space? You are being lied to!!!

'There's just stuff'
YES!


Of course theres JUST stuff, but we MEN must make meaning (we create it inadvertently) and we are also part of the cosmos: 'making meaning' is also a part of the universe


Let me summon Woody Allan to help us -
"subjectivity is objective"
(Love and Death )


The fact that you ARE searching for the truth betrays you already. Goddamn buddhist spend their entire life eradicating 'meaning' and 'ultimates' and we westerners just say - i don't believe. Way cool...

Hmmm.... observations should be data.

Other than that it was greta.

A dark age is coming.

Wake up dude. The dark age is now.

It's 2008 and we're watching a video that describes what scientific theory is in such a way that we really ought to be pausing every once in a while to check if our diapers are full. The dark age is coming? Really???

Eh, I think this video does a rather muddled job of getting its point across. What's the take away point from all of the definitions and examples of "inferences"? Why show Charles Darwin rambling in a study? That doesn't make it look any more rigorous.

The presentation should be much simpler-
1) Theories are the highest form of scientific understanding, developed from data and making testable hypotheses.
2) Here is some of the extraordinarily strong data on evolution.
3) Here are some of the hypotheses derived from that data, later confirmed by these findings or experiments.

If they want to talk about how theories are mutable, that's fine. If they want to draw analogies to heliocentric or gravitational theories, that's fine. I don't think they did a very good job, though.