Thread: Science vs Pseudoscience

Originally Posted by khaos

stubear ftw +1.

I would like to add repeatability (maybe I missed it?). If something is a hard fact (gravity for instance) it is consistent and always true. If I drop an apple, it will fall at an acceleration of -gMm/r^2 where g is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the earth, m is the mass of the apple, r is the distance between the two centroids.
I feel though that it is necessary to include normalization in these things because processes may necessarily be chaotic and therefor highly sensitive to initial conditions.

In laymans terms- Science is practiced by scientists, testing one variable, ceteris paribus, in a control manner and generating models. Pseudoscience is practiced by philosophers, observing phenomena and theorizing models.

Astronomy- using physics and data to model the universe. Highly repeatable. Landed men on the moon etc.
Astrology- using anecdotal observations of the stars and theories to accomplish the same task- before the "evolution"/split into astronomy led to many misconceptions (false "ends of the earth" dates, geocentricism, flat earth, etc....)

I still take issue with the statement that psuedoscience is only conducted by non-scientists. My half-baked allegories earlier in the thread were an attempt at showing this. Black holes, etc, are outside the realm of controlled environment, and are not even directly observable. And it is perhaps not quite right to term it psuedo-science, but calling it hard science is not quite right either.

Originally Posted by Seraphim

I still take issue with the statement that psuedoscience is only conducted by non-scientists. My half-baked allegories earlier in the thread were an attempt at showing this. Black holes, etc, are outside the realm of controlled environment, and are not even directly observable. And it is perhaps not quite right to term it psuedo-science, but calling it hard science is not quite right either.

It's hard science in the sense that it's a solid theory with both observation to support it and no falsifications to discount it. Because it can't be replicated due to the impossibility of being able to survive such a situation, doesn't mean it's not real.

And I'm not saying I'm particularly sold on the idea, but if you agree with the scientific method, you can't really call it pseudo-science.

Perhaps a more technical split would be, theorem, theory, and thought- "hard" science, "plausible" science, and pseudoscience.

Originally Posted by Oglethorpe

It's hard science in the sense that it's a solid theory with both observation to support it and no falsifications to discount it. Because it can't be replicated due to the impossibility of being able to survive such a situation, doesn't mean it's not real.

And I'm not saying I'm particularly sold on the idea, but if you agree with the scientific method, you can't really call it pseudo-science.

They are creating miniature black holes in labs now. just BTW

Originally Posted by khaos

They are creating miniature black holes in labs now. just BTW

The press headlines may say so, which sells papers, but I think the facts say differently:
Pseudo Black Hole Created in Lab - Yahoo! News

"The device we created is not a real black hole, but only a device to mimic the black-hole effect," said researcher Tie Jun Cui, a professor at Southeast University in China. "Actually, the device can trap and absorb the electromagnetic waves which hit the device. Hence we call it as the Electromagnetic Black Hole."

They have developed things that mimic certain aspects of black holes, they have not created mini black holes.

After a quick trip through cyber-space in search of info on black holes, I came across the Hubble official site, which had some stuff on black holes.

OK, so the theory is that a black hole is a collapsed giant star, right?

But through the laws of conservation of matter, don't both the star and the resulting black hole both have to have the same mass? Just because it collapses, and gets smaller, does not therefore increase it's mass, and make it all of a suddden a different gravitational force. The gravity per unit area would certainly be higher, but the overall mass must still be the same. And on a cosmic scale, does it matter if the mass is a few thousands of miles in diameter, or the size of a loaf of bread, if the nearest object is x millions of miles away?



Another ψάρια-science topic (since it may fall niether ubnder science, nor psuedo-science, I'm making a third category: fishy science): the Big Bang and the expanding universe.

So, if the theory is that the universe was created all of a sudden in the Big Bang. What was there before? What is outside of the bubble of our expanding sphere of the known universe? Is science saying that there is such a thing as nothing? An absence of anything?

The big bang theory is obviously pseudo science! its definitely not been studied and no numbers ever agree. Its as classic an example as geocentricism. Scientists observe somethings and make a guess, then set out proving that guess, rather than investigating. Also, when it comes to mass density and black holes, it does matter. If one accurately computed gravitational force it would be a volume integral, summing the individual particles' forces. Thus, a point mass would have a much more direct force than an infinitely large volume of equal mass. (masses to the side would add a lateral force)

Re: black holes: they can't be mimicked in labs (at least by definition) because they are not strong enough to attract photons.

Re: the big bag: again, by definition, is not pesudo science. i'd go so far as to call it "hard science". it's a theory with enough scientific evidence to support it's occurrence. the details of how it happened are what's in question (i.e. what is the explosive strength required to cause the particles to expand at the rate at which they did so as to not cause it to implode upon itself.


to be honest, i don't like the term pseudo-science.

Originally Posted by Oglethorpe

Re: black holes: they can't be mimicked in labs (at least by definition) because they are not strong enough to attract photons.

Re: the big bag: again, by definition, is not pesudo science. i'd go so far as to call it "hard science". it's a theory with enough scientific evidence to support it's occurrence. the details of how it happened are what's in question (i.e. what is the explosive strength required to cause the particles to expand at the rate at which they did so as to not cause it to implode upon itself.


to be honest, i don't like the term pseudo-science.

I really can't list Big Bang under hard science at all. It is conjecture, based on scientific ideas, but conjecture all the same.

Perhaps it is not expansion, but rather attraction from something beyond the range we can investigate?

There is some discourse as to why it seems that the rate of expansion is increasing, as opposed to slowing down, as would be reasonable to expect if the Big Bang theory is the guiding principle.

I say that is due to attaraction from sources outside of what we can percieve, and tghus, the objects on the outer reaches of the observable universe are becoming increasingly attrated to these Zbodies (I just made that up!), and thus making them accelerate, not slow down.

I'm calling this the Big Suck theory, as all the matter is being sucked away further and further, faster and faster.

Well, when you let something evaporate in a vacuum the vapor disperses itself evenly- this is the second law of thermo/entropy, basically, so how do we know its not just some random diffusion of matter into a vacuum?

But we digress. The original thread was about science in general, not astronomy. Though I would like to point out that the definitions we are generating are pseudoscientific in nature.