Re: We didn't start the fire? was Re: Alignment and 4E

Darin McBride wrote:
tussock wrote:

Bull***. Science tells us how *and* why. Religion hides in the places
people don't use science and tries to do the same.

Science can only ever attempt to explain the how. Never the why.

Not letting the meaning of words get in your way, then.

And, of course, it can't really answer the how at the deepest levels (at
least, not yet - if anyone can finally come up with the Grand Unifying
Theory, then perhaps, but we won't know until we get there).

Yes, we do know, a huge amount.

Why do we fall? Gravity. How? No clue.

Acceleration due to gravity is an effect of the curved nature of
spacetime around massive objects. Mass is the name we give to an effect
related to the uncertainty principle. Do you want to know more?

Particles called gravitons have been postulated, but I've never heard
of anyone proving they exist.

They're just a modelling tool, like numbers and letters. Wondering
about the "existance" of force particles just shows you don't get it. But
that's OK, it's natural not to get things outside our biological origins.

(Of course, I use the term "particle" extremely loosely here as we
don't really know WHAT exists at that small of a scale - sometimes they
act as particles, sometimes as waves, just like photons, but gravitons
can penetrate matter, unlike photons.)

And science tells us exactly why we can't comprehend things at that
scale; it's related to the evolution of our brain, it only models the
world to the extent our prehistoric ancestors could directly interact
with it.

Why are we limited to the speed of light? No clue. "It's the nature of
the universe." That's not an answer. It's a question (or it should be
to any sufficiently advanced theoretical scientist).

Rubbish. Light moves infinately "fast", it's just that infinately
"fast" isn't properly measured in human terms of displacement and time,
but rather by an inverse hyperbolic function of energy and momentum
vectors. We can't get to that infinatly "fast" speed without expending
infinate energy, which is fairly self-evident, really.
Again, evolutionary limits on how we understand additive velocety,
and the way we naturally attempted to model it centuries ago weren't
correct, and we know /why/ thanks to science.

Why does time slow down/objects gain mass at high speeds (relative to
c)?

Time doesn't slow down, it's just not obvious how simultaneity works
at those speeds, or how refererence frames work, or what happens to our
place in spacetime when we accelerate, again, thanks to evolutionary
limits on our brain's ability to model the world. Minkowski space is
weird, but it's far more real than the more "obvious" Newtonian model.

There is no mass change, that's just an out of date shortcut for a
simplistic model made for school kids. You're measuring the wrong way.

What is an electron made up of? Neutron? Proton? Ok, we have theories
on this (quantum mechanics), but I'm not sure we've been able to prove
them or not. How about anti-electrons? Anti-neutrons? Anti-protons?
Photons? Anti-photons? What are quarks made up of?

Energy, duh.

We know that positive charges repel positive charges. What keeps
protons together in an atomic nucleus? Ok, it's the "strong force."
But what the heck IS that? How does it come about?

To force protons and neutrons together as they are in a stable atomic
nucleus, you have to release a great deal of energy from them in various
forms, feel free to look it up.
You can't pull them apart again without adding that energy back in.
That's the strong force, an easily comprehensable representation of the
energy released by atomic binding.

Science is getting quite good at dealing with reality at our own level:
low-speed (relative to c), large scale (atomic and larger), short
distance (mostly from here to the moon, not even generally that large -
we'll see how well we understand larger scale if we can get a manned
mission to Mars and back). Outside this comfort zone, we know little
(not nothing) though we have many unproven theories.

No, not at all. See, science has explained /your/ notion of a
"comfort zone" a long time ago, you're just not well enough educated to
keep up with it.
Our brain evolved a model of the world that can only handle the parts
we could interact with, math and science have /long/ since gone beyond
that, even the ancient greeks figured out things we couldn't easily
understand.

Oddly enough, some of these theories are unprovable by the scientific
method, but because they don't contain hints of "god" they are
acceptable to scientists, but I digress.

What a load of crap.

Science is supposed to be like a 3-year-old-child, always asking "why."

Rubber, glue, etc.

Unlike the 3-year-old, however, it should not be content with answers of
"that's just the way it is." And that's why science can't answer why:
science is supposed to be the question, not the answer.

Rubbish. Scientific method is a tool for understanding reality.
That's what it is, that's what it does.

--
tussock

I'm like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gunna get.
.

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