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To: Stosh

I agree with your post, but physics has also descended into unrigorous assertions, esp. in the climate thing.


22 posted on 06/25/2012 6:02:02 AM PDT by expat2
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To: expat2

You’re absolutely correct about the whole “climate change / global warming” crap, but that’s because the emphasis there is political (”consensus”) rather than scientific.

Global climate is actually a really interesting field because it’s so doggone complex - everything from cosmic rays (which operate at the atomic level) to the earth’s albedo (which operates at the scale of the size of continents), as well as dozens of things in between influence global climate and its dynamics. Physicists should be having decades of fun trying to sort out all this stuff, because it’s just so complicated.

But the current debate has been dominated by politics, even in the professional scientific societies, like the American Chemical Society and the American Physical Society.

And that should be the key point - keep the science and the politics as much separated from each other as possible; failing to do so will just destroy what credibility the physical sciences have earned over the past couple of centuries.

And by the way, I’m not one of those folks who think science is the be all and end all of human endeavors; it does what it does exceptionally well, but it has limited value in dealing with most of the most important questions human’s face (like “why are we here?” and “how should we live?”).


28 posted on 06/25/2012 9:21:45 AM PDT by Stosh
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To: expat2
I agree with your post, but physics has also descended into unrigorous assertions, esp. in the climate thing.

And 'string theory'. 

It's not even wrong.

29 posted on 06/25/2012 9:22:54 AM PDT by zeugma (Those of us who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living.)
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