A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
There are most certainly scientific facts regardless of what halfwit postmodernist doctrine (not a personal attack because I dont think Klaus is speaking from the position of a humanities student who deals with truths instead of facts) of many says about there being only truths and that truth is subjective and may be found in different places. I challenge anybody that doubts there being scientific facts to drink down a glass of H2S04 instead of H20 becase it only differs by a sulphur and 3 oxygen atoms and that alone wont make a difference.
A solid definition for scientific fact is
It is a scientific fact that the Sun rose this morning (just as it is a scientific fact that species of animal gradually change and adapt over time, the fossil record and experiments show this over and over again).
Scientific Facts are explained by way of scientific theories.
An hypothesis for the Sun rising in the morning is that the earth is a flat disk and that the sun moves above this disk like a fixture on a roof. This hypothesis is testable because we can experiment and prove that the earth is not flat. Knowing that the earth isnt flat we have a new fact, using the spherical earth model we can construct a geocentric universe that may explain the motion of the Sun and planets with mathematics pretty well. Eventually we discover that things orbit in ellipses and that the geocentric model doesn't work, this new scientific fact leads us to a mew theory that can explain the new facts, this gives rise to a heliocentric solar system, eventually leading to our current picture of the universe.
You see the facts rarely change and when they do it is a paradigm shift, before we had a THEORY of universal gravitation things fell down, before we had the THEORY general relativity black holes still existed and before we had the THEORY of Evolution by means of Natural Selection all the facts that proved it still existed.
A scientific theory is an an hypothesis that can explain facts and make accurate predictions of experiments and observations, a scientific theory is falsifiable as if new evidence new facts that contradict it are found may be able to disprove it.
Mutation and Evolution are most certainly facts, how they occur is the theory portion, we understand many mechanisms for population diversity and pressures and these mechanisms allow us to construct theories. There is no direct link between evolution and cosmology. I do not find a mid Cretaceous Therapod and then march over to a physicist and tell him that this proves m-theory correct and will contradict Relativity. Understanding the formation of the universe is a clear scientific discipline, we have observations, facts. We know that there is a speed of light as has be measured accurately since the Michelson Morley experiment and subsequant more advanced experiments have verified this (this includes the superluminal observations that have to do with a faster than light group velocity which still disallows information from travelling back in time because the signal velocity will allways be below the speed of light). We also know that if we look into the sky we are looking at radiation from far away, the longer the distance the furthur away the star is, when we use the most powerful radio telescopes or the WMAP probe we can look back to the very beggining of light, this is called Cosmic Background Radiation, it is a snapshot of the universe just after it had formed and inflated. Knowing this and the fact that the light has been redshifted from high energy back down into microwave we can say the wavelenths have expanded in transit due to the observed redshift, hence we have another fact. These two facts tell us 1) The Universe in its current iteration began just before the CBR was formed. 2) The Universe is expanding.
Armed with these two facts we can work out the rate the universe is expanding and because it is expanding in every direction (kinda like a muffin or cake in an oven) and then using this rate of expansion work backwards to find out when it all existed in a single point, this dates the universe at around 13.7 billion years which matches up with the facts we know. There are still big problems with this theory because it cannot explain the uniform nature of the background radiation, how two portions of universe seperated by tremendous distances share common features, so we add in an inflationary phase to the universe. All these adjustments are made so that the theory can fit the observations better however they are not perfect, this tells us that there is still more work to be done until we have a theory that can match the observations and explain what we observe in the future. This is the process of using scientific facts and observations to construct theories.
With any theory there is a threshold of confidence to it in making predictions and its general accuracy in describing observations. Evolutionary Theories have a very high level of acceptance to such a degree that they are treated as facts (evolution itself happpens, it is a fact, how it occurs and the mechanisms are the theories) this contrasts to the Theory of Universal Gravitation which can explain most everyday observations really well (They still use newtonian physics to launch space probes) but when applied to something like High Energy Particle Physics break down, giving it a much lower confidence than General Relativity which can explain all the things Newton could in addition to the speed of light and extremes of Mass and Density in the universe.
In conclusion there are Scientific Facts that are not some sort of Subjective Truths. These facts can be explained with theories. Theories are retained as long as they are useful and do not contradict what facts we know. Test out some scientific facts by Dropping a ball to prove that there is some sort of force acting on it, Breeding drosophila to show how some traits are expressed and passed down, mixing elemental Sodium into water and observing a highly exothermic chemical reaction. There are Scientific Facts!!!
A solid definition for scientific fact is
It is a scientific fact that the Sun rose this morning (just as it is a scientific fact that species of animal gradually change and adapt over time, the fossil record and experiments show this over and over again).
Scientific Facts are explained by way of scientific theories.
An hypothesis for the Sun rising in the morning is that the earth is a flat disk and that the sun moves above this disk like a fixture on a roof. This hypothesis is testable because we can experiment and prove that the earth is not flat. Knowing that the earth isnt flat we have a new fact, using the spherical earth model we can construct a geocentric universe that may explain the motion of the Sun and planets with mathematics pretty well. Eventually we discover that things orbit in ellipses and that the geocentric model doesn't work, this new scientific fact leads us to a mew theory that can explain the new facts, this gives rise to a heliocentric solar system, eventually leading to our current picture of the universe.
You see the facts rarely change and when they do it is a paradigm shift, before we had a THEORY of universal gravitation things fell down, before we had the THEORY general relativity black holes still existed and before we had the THEORY of Evolution by means of Natural Selection all the facts that proved it still existed.
A scientific theory is an an hypothesis that can explain facts and make accurate predictions of experiments and observations, a scientific theory is falsifiable as if new evidence new facts that contradict it are found may be able to disprove it.
Mutation and Evolution are most certainly facts, how they occur is the theory portion, we understand many mechanisms for population diversity and pressures and these mechanisms allow us to construct theories. There is no direct link between evolution and cosmology. I do not find a mid Cretaceous Therapod and then march over to a physicist and tell him that this proves m-theory correct and will contradict Relativity. Understanding the formation of the universe is a clear scientific discipline, we have observations, facts. We know that there is a speed of light as has be measured accurately since the Michelson Morley experiment and subsequant more advanced experiments have verified this (this includes the superluminal observations that have to do with a faster than light group velocity which still disallows information from travelling back in time because the signal velocity will allways be below the speed of light). We also know that if we look into the sky we are looking at radiation from far away, the longer the distance the furthur away the star is, when we use the most powerful radio telescopes or the WMAP probe we can look back to the very beggining of light, this is called Cosmic Background Radiation, it is a snapshot of the universe just after it had formed and inflated. Knowing this and the fact that the light has been redshifted from high energy back down into microwave we can say the wavelenths have expanded in transit due to the observed redshift, hence we have another fact. These two facts tell us 1) The Universe in its current iteration began just before the CBR was formed. 2) The Universe is expanding.
Armed with these two facts we can work out the rate the universe is expanding and because it is expanding in every direction (kinda like a muffin or cake in an oven) and then using this rate of expansion work backwards to find out when it all existed in a single point, this dates the universe at around 13.7 billion years which matches up with the facts we know. There are still big problems with this theory because it cannot explain the uniform nature of the background radiation, how two portions of universe seperated by tremendous distances share common features, so we add in an inflationary phase to the universe. All these adjustments are made so that the theory can fit the observations better however they are not perfect, this tells us that there is still more work to be done until we have a theory that can match the observations and explain what we observe in the future. This is the process of using scientific facts and observations to construct theories.
With any theory there is a threshold of confidence to it in making predictions and its general accuracy in describing observations. Evolutionary Theories have a very high level of acceptance to such a degree that they are treated as facts (evolution itself happpens, it is a fact, how it occurs and the mechanisms are the theories) this contrasts to the Theory of Universal Gravitation which can explain most everyday observations really well (They still use newtonian physics to launch space probes) but when applied to something like High Energy Particle Physics break down, giving it a much lower confidence than General Relativity which can explain all the things Newton could in addition to the speed of light and extremes of Mass and Density in the universe.
In conclusion there are Scientific Facts that are not some sort of Subjective Truths. These facts can be explained with theories. Theories are retained as long as they are useful and do not contradict what facts we know. Test out some scientific facts by Dropping a ball to prove that there is some sort of force acting on it, Breeding drosophila to show how some traits are expressed and passed down, mixing elemental Sodium into water and observing a highly exothermic chemical reaction. There are Scientific Facts!!!
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