The Ptolemaic explanation worked just as well once the planets were treated as spheres. It was the detailed observation of all the planets' movements that finally settled the issue.
But, just for fun.
Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.
They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.
After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."
That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Kepler formulated his laws based on Tycho Brahe's observations. Galileo wasn't the one who resolved this issue. His work was mostly stopped after his problems with the Church and his resistance to the idea of gravity.
But we could talk about Ferdinand Verbiest and others... ;)
That would certainly be attempted, but if you look at the gullibility of the Bible Code folks, looking for patterns will certainly yield patterns. If an obvious message emerges that would clinch it, but what if it's bank statements encrypted with a quantum algorithm?
The SETI folks are just looking for a carrier. What happens after that depends on unforeseeable things.
It was Galileo who discovered Venus's phases. What more resolution do you need?
The Ptolemaic explanation worked just as well once the planets were treated as spheres. It was the detailed observation of all the planets' movements that finally settled the issue.
But, just for fun.
Science cannot invalidate anything, or prove anything. Science is not in that business. Science has not demonstrated that astrology is invalid--it has merely demonstrated that under it's current paradigms, it cannot detect astrological theory at work. Science detected fixed continents for 1000 years, and then 50 years ago, science learned how to see things differently, and suddenly the continents were perceived to move. Show me how you have proved that the case for astrology can't be any different.
Come on now. Of course many, maybe a majority, have, at one time or another, probably before high school.
What they're doing is gathering data that will either show directly that there is, or will help to formulate a theory about whether or not there is.
Come on now. What motivates SETI researchers? What leverages SETI research grants? What pursuades trillions of hackers to devote their idle machine time to the search? The hope that we can formulate a theory, eventually?
SETI itself is not a theory. You can not compare it at all to ID or macroevolutionary theory. The more you insist on making the comparison, the more muddled the discussion is going to be.
Disagreeing with you does not, perforce, make a discussion muddled. Of course SETI is an attempt to resolve two opposed, proposed theories. Just like the Michaelson-Morley experiment was, [sorry about the spelling] And in quite similar circumstances, with analogeous stakes.
80% of the "science" involved in Evolution theory is bunk: This consensus science trend IS dogma.
Why is there so much tolerance of this wanton destruction of the reputation of the field of science? There was a time when a successful challenge of a scientific observation or conclusion was all it took to send everyone back to the labs. These days, if even 55% say "It sounds reasonable", then any attempt to debunk the results is shut down by the loud majority.
Scientific progress is being undermined by majority rulesitis!
SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I have a tough time thinking there isn't a pre-formed hypothesis about extra-terrestrial intelligence being investigated here.
And the brainwashing begins...
90% of pugnacious statements about evolution by evolutionary theory's skeptics is patently obvious nonsense that cannot be supported by evidence.
And what would that be? Is it a secret? The instruments are searching for a narrow band transmission. That's all.
Good, we agree. That means SETI is not itself a theory, which means it's inappropriate to compare it to ID. If you want to compare ID to the "theory" that extraterrestrial life does exist (which I'm still pretty sure is not part of any science curriculum), then that's a different line of inquiry.
It is not remotely "infinitely superior". Most of the time it is utterly useless excess baggage, which usually makes it harder, not easier, to understand, manipulate or explain scientific questions outside of large-scale astronomy and astrophysics, and blowing-things-up theory--an obscure branch of quantum physics.
There is no platonic purity test for whether something is a science or not. A thing is a science if enough scientists concede it is, after banging on the question long enough. It worked for ether, it worked for phrenology, it worked for fixed continents. There is no safety hiding behind Plato's skirts and insisting that some things have passed some mysterious test that makes them holy and true, and other theories are scum. There isn't a clear, simple, definitive criteria that makes SETI a blessed science, and ID a scum science. You just have to see if it is wrestling with the intractible nature of stuff, in a detailed, rigorous, and self-critical manner that most scientists recognize and understand, and which isn't too bizzarely self-contradictory.
OK, have it your way: SETI is not a theory. It is a search, intended to try to validate the proposed theory that Extra-Terrestrial intelligence exists. ID is a theory--searching for ID would be equivalent to SETI. I feel much better now.
Um...right, we fund SETI activity, because we hope to find a modulated narrow band transmission, and we have no pre-conceived notion whatsoever about what we hope that might mean if we find it. Did I mention that SETI stands for "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence"?
Well, yes--I missed that point because I stopped thinking about what I was reading right about at the notion that 80% of all the finds in every natural history museum in the world are bogus.
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