Thread: Science vs Pseudoscience

Originally Posted by gugi

I am sorry, but demonstrating how you can mislead does not offer any support that they actually have done that.

I didn't mislead anybody. My laser has less output power than a nightlight, plain and simple facts. I'll testify to that in a court of law.

To your first post:
Well, in that case, I still disagree with you. I think the only reason it could be called misleading is because of the sheer number of protons and, therefore, the total energy of the beam.

Even if they have similar or the same power output, a night light and a laser are two totally different things. It's not as if they said that there are mosquitoes flying around in the ring.

To your second:
Telling the truth is what makes it misleading instead of lying.

Originally Posted by Jimbo

Oh, mathematics is fuzzy, or can be. Mathematics, and the proofs contained therein, is riddled with approximations - Taylor's Theorem is all about approximation, for example. A lot of real-world applications of mathematical constructs simply descend (or ascend, depending on your point of view) into approximation sophistry.

I agree but those approximations are well understood to be just that, they were created with a purpose of simplifying things at the cost of loss of precision and their limits and conditions are usually well understood.

That cannot be always said about the other sciences and the level of fuzziness that they embrace.

Originally Posted by Seraphim

No, my point was that giving such a benign example of the power was painting a picture that was not telling the whole story.

Right, but nobody wants the whole story. Because the whole story requires a lot of work.
What actually matters is 'is it safe', and obviously LHC people think the answer is 'yes'. If we're talking about energies it's obvious that the LHC is completely inefficient - to accelerate a small beam of protons to energies of a mosquito it draws power of a medium sized town. And you know what, all that excess energy goes somewhere. It has the potential to cause a lot of damage, but would it?

Your laser is actually completely harmless to me, because I know to stay away from the 'laser beam'. But am I the only person here to find it interesting that you never mention any sharks (or at least mutated sea bas)? Could it have something to do with one billian gazdillion civillion shabaludilioan dollars?

Originally Posted by holli4pirating

To your first post:
Well, in that case, I still disagree with you. I think the only reason it could be called misleading is because of the sheer number of protons and, therefore, the total energy of the beam.

Even if they have similar or the same power output, a night light and a laser are two totally different things. It's not as if they said that there are mosquitoes flying around in the ring.

To your second:
Telling the truth is what makes it misleading instead of lying.

Then why did they mention mosquitoes in the first place? Was that just to bug me?

I never said they were lying, did I?

this is what I said:

Another interesting bit of propaganda in that link to the LHC:


Quote:

Nature forms black holes when certain stars, much larger than our Sun, collapse on themselves at the end of their lives. They concentrate a very large amount of matter in a very small space. Speculations about microscopic black holes at the LHC refer to particles produced in the collisions of pairs of protons, each of which has an energy comparable to that of a mosquito in flight. Astronomical black holes are much heavier than anything that could be produced at the LHC.

They try to placate you by saying "look at these little protons....each has no more enrgy than a mosquito in flight..."

But in reality, they want to accelerate those cute little protons to close to the speed of light and smash them together, per another portion of their website:


Quote:

Inside the accelerator, two beams of particles travel at close to the speed of light with very high energies before colliding with one another.

In other words, they are most certainly trying to spin their mosquito accelerator just as much as I am my picosecond nightlight.

Originally Posted by sparq

I agree but those approximations are well understood to be just that, they were created with a purpose of simplifying things at the cost of loss of precision and their limits and conditions are usually well understood.

That cannot be always said about the other sciences and the level of fuzziness that they embrace.

Well, if you consider knowing what happens to your remainder as things tend to infinity "well understood", then yes I also agree with you

But never fear, other sciences have statistics!!! That wonderful branch of mathematics specifically designed to deal with and quantify scientific fuzziness of all descriptions!! Do we seek the glory? No! Do we receive the glory? No! But all praise the humble statistician, shuffling his way through turgid designs of varying levels of ineptitude, exploring data in varying states of decay and uncleanliness. His is a hard and unappreciated lot. He is often maligned, frequently defamed as a purveyor of damned lies. Yet without him, empiricism and science would descend into chaos faster than a child star in Hollywood (zing!).

James.

Ok, you got me there. Statistics is voodoo magic indeed!

Originally Posted by Jimbo

Well, if you consider knowing what happens to your remainder as things tend to infinity "well understood", then yes I also agree with you

But never fear, other sciences have statistics!!! That wonderful branch of mathematics specifically designed to deal with and quantify scientific fuzziness of all descriptions!! Do we seek the glory? No! Do we receive the glory? No! But all praise the humble statistician, shuffling his way through turgid designs of varying levels of ineptitude, exploring data in varying states of decay and uncleanliness. His is a hard and unappreciated lot. He is often maligned, frequently defamed as a purveyor of damned lies. Yet without him, empiricism and science would descend into chaos faster than a child star in Hollywood (zing!).

James.

My hats off to the hapless and much maligned statistician.

Originally Posted by Jimbo

descend into chaos faster than a child star in Hollywood (zing!).

Kirk Cameron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oh ho!

Those rascals at LHC are up to their old tricks again:
World's largest atom smasher breaks power record - Yahoo! News

One proton at 1 TeV is about the energy of the motion of a flying mosquito. When a beam is fully packed with 300,000 billion protons with 7 TeV energy — the goal of the LHC — it is like an aircraft carrier traveling at 20 knots. That is why the scientists are carefully learning how to run it and make sure all protection systems are working, said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Oh, gosh....did we forget to mention that it wouldn't just be a single mosquito?

And what would sufficient protection sytems be? Deep woods Off bugspray?