Applying Science to Past Events

Aren't all events, by definition, in the past?If you make an observation, it's in the past. It's gone. All you have now are your records; that event that you observed is forever in the inaccessable past.To say that you can't perform science on events in the past is to say that you can't perform science at all. Everything we've made observations of is in the past.

Come over to the "Gaming Thread" in the Coffeehouse where we're having a normal discussion about what games we like to play.

All events are in the past or the future, though. So you're saying that the scientific method can be applied to nothing at all?

Applied to what? By the time you've applied it, it's in the past.

You can predict what you're going to find, like fossils and things. The fossils were deposited in the past.I don't know why you included "future" in this - obviously, predictions about the future can be tested. That's the definition of "prediction." I think you may have mistyped that.

Trivially obvious. So what?

Scientific theories are also overturned in the light of new evidence.But that doesn't mean we don't know anything about the past, or that we can't come to conclusions about the past. It simply means that we realize our conclusions are tentative. When do they ever say "we're 100 percent certain"? All scientific conclusions are understood to be tentative. If you're getting "100 percent certainty", you're misunderstanding. No scientific conclusion is ever offered as 100 percent certain.

Well, shit, RR, what do you think those guys do for their expensive degrees? Model lab coats all day?A doctorate in science involves years of training in laboratory procedures, experiment design, scientific writing, rigorous application of the scientific method, and, of course, years and years of catching up to the current state of knowledge in one's field.Developing theory isn't just a matter of making shit up, RR. It isn't a theory until it can be tested, and designing experiments that accurately test theories takes years and years of training.Much in the same way you have to be a surgeon before you have the "authority" to operate on someone's heart, you have to have undergone the rigorous training of a science education to offer worthwhile contributions to the body of scientific knowledge.

But it is, though. The evidence is so overwhelming that we tenatively conclude that evolution is an accurate model of the history of life on Earth. It's as accurate as it could possibly be given the state of our knowledge.

That's a lot more grounded in reality than just making up whatever you want, like religion.

I'm not, by my wife is a graduate student in entomology. They're good because they combine methodical reasoning (which they learned) with a deep basis of research (which they learned). Talent doesn't get you far in the sciences, because we've already done so much science that the "frontiers", if you will, are a long way from everyday experience. You have to study what's been done before you can do something new, and that process takes years. Neither smartness nor wisdom will aid you in the generation and testing of theory as much as a science education will, not by a long shot.

It doesn't take smarts to do what they do, and what you think you can do.It takes education, and you don't have it. They do. That's why we leave the theorizing to them, and why we're just goofballs posting junk on the internet.

?You think that making up shit off the top of your head is a better way to find out about reality than the scientific process of observation, hypothesis, testing, and peer review?That's simply idiotic.

It's easy to blow your top when somebody so arrgoantly dismisses an entire field of labor, especially one you've watched a loved one pour sweat and tears into for the past several years.I've held my sobbing wife as she struggled with some arcane biological concept or got a poor grade on a test. And RR thinks he can do better by virtue of being unconstrained by intelligence or education?Yeah, it burns me up too. But it's so much easier and more effective to show how little he knows, by public demonstration of his impotence in addressing even the simplest challenges of science.

For the areas in which we're discussing - biology, geology, paleontology, physics - it is, though. Making substantiatial contributions to those areas requires years of education, because of the vast, vast amount of groundwork already laid in those theories.Newton's famous quote is "if I have seen father than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." That was 400 years ago, and we've stacked up a hell of a lot of giants since then. If you want to do the seeing, you've got a lot of climbing to do. You're simply not going to be able to see as far from your vantage on the ground. Your idea was ridiculous on the surface. That's what we've been trying to tell you. The reason that you've never seen your idea before is because it's so patently wrong that any discriminating intellect would have rejected it immediately.