The Science is Settled

 “The Science is settled.”

Let me tell you why that’s a retarded statement, and almost no scientist would be dumb enough to say it.

Science is me, coming up with a hypothesis, let’s call it the theory of relativity. Then I conduct all these experiments, and I find out my theory is sound, to a high degree of accuracy, wiping out our Newtonian notions of what space-time is, etc. (Which nobody understands yet, but I’ll get to that later.)

But I still have to be ready to defend my theory. And it only takes one case where it doesn’t work or another theory comes along that’s more accurate, and I’m, well, Newtonian.

So defending your shit is a part of science. I had someone challenge my results last week, and I had to defend them. We do these things with data, and measurements, and things called p-values, and everything must be reproducible by an independent observer, and eventually a hypothesis will reach acceptance, or be rejected. That’s the process.

And if someone comes down the pike ten, or fifteen, or thirty years from now, and finds out I made a mistake in my calculations and the theory is jacked, or if I cherry-picked my data and everyone missed it, or whatever, ITS OVER. By the way, we have a real problem in science with this stuff nowadays. It’s called the Replication Crisis. It’s estimated that 65% of soft science studies have results that are not-reproducible (shitty) and the entire hypothesis and conclusions were shit (But you should check my data on that before you accept my conclusion).

Everyone in this country should know the scientific process, it should be taught every year from the second grade up. Maybe the third grade, I’m not sure. But idiots can get away with saying ‘The Science is Settled’ because only a tiny percentage of us actually do research, and know that process. But it’s not hard shit to know, not the process. That’s really a human management process, because humans aren’t robots and we need to trust but verify. Kids can be taught this process in every science class, and should be. You shouldn’t be sitting in college asking ‘What’s a p-value?’ Everyone should already know that, even before high school. Kids would be told in the lab, “Amy, check Tommy’s data and see if you get the same mean. No? OK Amy, tell everyone Tommy’s theory is rejected, ruin his career, and get him fired even though he has tenure.”

OK, I’m joking a little here, but you get the gist, right?

We have this process in place to try and direct discoveries down the right road. The right road being theories that aren’t a huge waste of time and money.

But instead of being taught the scientific process in the third grade, I had this teacher with half a brain tell the young impressionable minds about Zeno’s paradox:

I can't walk over to you because I first have to get halfway there, and once I do, I still have to cover half the remaining distance, and once I get there I have to cover half of that remaining distance, ad infinitum. There are an infinite number of halfway points, and so according to logic, I'll never be able to get there.

OK, this confused my young brain, because I was too dumb to figure out that the statements from a physical point of view make no sense. You don’t walk from one point to another by covering half the distance, the equation of motion is:

v = dx/dt

Velocity is change in position over unit time. So even if I chopped the x up into x/2 then t would be t/2 but the point is, I would still be moving until I got over to you. In other words Zeno’s paradox isn’t a paradox at all because it makes a false assertion about my movement, that if I change x and half it will affect my movement, my velocity. But you can’t change x arbitrarily, without it affecting t also.

From a quantum mechanical perspective also, it makes a faulty assumption. It assumes you can half your steps forever. But quantum mechanics doesn’t allow this. You can’t get down to anything smaller than the Plank length, it just isn’t allowed. Now I understand it’s a bit much to expect a third grade teacher to know quantum mechanics make’s things work differently down there, but goddamn, they could have a simple notion of what velocity is. At least if they’re going to confuse young’uns with Zeno’s paradox. Interestingly enough, back in the day people used Zeno’s paradox to try and discredit physics and science by confusing people.

Good job, teacher! The Science is settled!