The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darned sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain. – Richard Feynman*
vs. Darwin’s theory of evolution is supported by “mountains of evidence,” or “mountains and mountains of evidence” or is even “fact! fact! FACT!”?
Change over time, yes. Patterns in the change? Yes. Things to learn? Yes.
but
Darwin’s theory of how it happened as the single best idea anyone has ever had, greater than Newton or Einstein or everyone else?
(Huh?)
That’s why there is a controversy.
*Note: Emphasis is in the material quoted from from What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, considered by many the founder of quantum electrodynamics.
Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista
The most dangerous tendency of the modern world is the way in which bogus theories are given the force of dogma.
– Jean Danielou, The Lord of History, 1958
…from the same quotes link above
and
Outside the practice of science itself, scientists have sometimes been the greatest offenders in adhering to dogmatic ideas against all the evidence.
– Mary B. Hesse, Science and the Human Imagination, 1955
Besides Feynman’s work on the atomic bomb (Manhattan Project) at Los Alamos during World War II, I believe Feynman’s most important contribution to science was his contribution to the theory of quantum electrodynamics, or QED.
How Feynman accomplished the unification of special relativity with quantum mechanics is that he ‘brushed infinity under the rug’ with what are termed Feyman’s diagrams:
Feynman expresses his apt uneasiness with ‘brushing infinity under the rug’ in this following video:
I don’t know about Feynman, but as for myself, being a Christian Theist, I find it rather comforting to know that it takes an ‘infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do’:
Although I’m not a mathematician in any real sense, the following quote gives even a mathematical novice like me a solid clue as to why infinity would present such a major problem for unifying General Relativity and QED:
And again, as a Christian Theist, I find it rather comforting to know that it takes an ‘omnipresent’ infinite dimensional Hilbert space to describe Quantum Mechanics properly.
The ‘infinity problem’ between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics is more fully elucidated here:
and here:
Moreover, there was a recent breakthrough in mathematics which greatly increased the efficiency of calculations to calculate particle interactions,,,
But please note the important piece of the puzzle they left out in order to accomplish such efficiency in their calculations:
Physicist Dr. Sheldon comments on the breakthrough here:
Besides the fact that the mathematical breakthrough did not incorporate gravity (General Relativity) and that the mathematical breakthrough was, in fact, only possible by ignoring (completely?) the space time of General Relativity, my other problem with their speculations about what their breakthrough could possible explain in the future,,,
,,,is the question of, “how are you going to explain how ‘the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry’ if you have now completely chucked General Relativity, our best model for describing our 4D space-time of gravity, as well as the expansion of the universe, in the Garbage?”
Moreover, besides basically starting from square zero in explaining the ‘cosmic evolution’ of the universe when they kicked General Relativity to the curb, trying to explain how the ‘universe arose out of pure geometry’ runs headlong into Godel’s incompleteness theorem:
Dr. Gordon, in his extremely clear, to the point, manner, puts the problem of believing the ‘universe arose out of pure geometry’ this way:
Another major problem, in their hope of finding out how ‘the universe arose out of pure geometry’, besides throwing General Relativity under the bus, is that they have also apparently ignored the fact that there is an irreducible subjective element in Quantum Mechanics that is definitely not a part of, or reducible to, ‘pure geometry’:
But where we do find a very credible complete unification of ALL the attributes of General Relativity (including entropy) with ALL the attributes of Quantum Mechanics (including consciousness), into the much sought after ‘theory of everything’, is in a place where many scientists would never ever even think to look. This place where COMPLETE unification is achieved between all the attributes of these two great theories of science, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, is in the resurrection event of Jesus Christ.
Verses and Music:
Supplemental note;
If scientists want to find the source for the supernatural light which made the “3D – photographic negative” image on the Shroud I suggest they look to the thousands of documented Near-Death Experiences (NDE’s) in Judeo-Christian cultures. It is in their testimonies that you will find mention of an indescribably bright ‘Light’ or ‘Being of Light’ who is always described as being of a much brighter intensity of light than the people had ever seen before.
Feynman seems to have been down to earth scientist. His books seem to suggest he had insatiable curiosity and was able to figure out things even without knowing the basics! It seems he figured out there was a problem in cooling tower system of nuclear fuel storage without even knowing what the symbols on the flowchart represented.We don’t have scientists like that now a days.
The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science – Chad Orzel – May 5, 2011
Excerpt: When you get down to it, there are really only two theories in the running for the title of “The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science”: relativity and quantum mechanics, specifically quantum electro-dynamics (QED). Both theories predict tiny shifts in quantities that are well known from other theories– the rate of ticking of a clock, or the energy difference between two states of an atom– and in both cases, those predictions have withstood a huge battery of experimental tests. There is no question that both general relativity and QED are correct theories, at least within their well-understood limits. (Somewhat embarrassingly, the two don’t play nice together, so neither works well in contexts where both gravity and quantum effects are important. We can’t access any of those contexts experimentally at present, though.)
So, which of the two is The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science?
It’s a little tough to quantify a title like that, but I think relativity can claim to have tested the smallest effects. Things like the aluminum ion clock experiments showing shifts in the rate of a clock set moving at a few m/s, or raised by a foot, measure relativistic shifts of a few parts in 1016. That is, if one clock ticks 10,000,000,000,000,000 times, the other ticks 9,999,999,999,999,999 times. That’s an impressively tiny effect, but the measured value is in good agreement with the predictions of relativity.
In the end, though, I have to give the nod to QED, because while the absolute effects in relativity may be smaller, the precision of the measurements in QED is more impressive. Experimental tests of relativity measure tiny shifts, but to only a few decimal places. Experimental tests of QED measure small shifts, but to an absurd number of decimal places. The most impressive of these is the “anomalous magnetic moment of the electron,” expressed is terms of a number g whose best measured value is:
g/2 = 1.001 159 652 180 73 (28)
Depending on how you want to count it, that’s either 11 or 14 digits of precision (the value you would expect without QED is exactly 1, so in some sense, the shift really starts with the first non-zero decimal place), which is just incredible. And QED correctly predicts all those decimal places (at least to within the measurement uncertainty, given by the two digits in parentheses at the end of that).
http://scienceblogs.com/princi.....sted-theo/
ba77: Have you considered creating an online searchable database of all the material you have gathered?
well cantor, I don’t know much about ‘online searchable databases’ but if you click on my handle, my most often used notes are there.