hihi

My friend sez the General Theory of Relativity is Bullshit. He says, there's no such thing as "space-time" or gravity as a curve. He thinks it's just a "force" that is unexplainable...


Any good raep lines to prove him absolutely wrong???

If he used the word 'unexplainable', you can call him on being fundamentally unscientific. That's as damning a raep line as any, if you know even the slightest amount of shit.

Tell him it doesn't matter one shit what he believes, as long as GR makes useful and correct predictions.

>>1
If he seriously thinks that all of GR boils down to what could be called (by an uneducated buffoon) an unexplainable "force," he doesn't know enough about GR to have an opinion on its veracity.

>>1
Finite speed of light.

Does anyone here even know GR? You need to learn a lot to get there.

RANDOM THREAD TO TOP!!

>>4 = true

The problem is that the General Theory of Relativity is just that-a theory. When scientists come up with enough experimental evidence to prove most of its assertions and predictions, it will become the General Law of Relativity and your friend will HAVE to accept it. As long as it remains a theory, no matter how useful it has been and continues to be, no one has to accept it and can trash it to their hearts content unfortunately.

>>9
your joking , right?
Replace "general theory of relativity" with evolution, and you got yourself a creationist argument :)

>>10
HAY GUYS WHAT'S GOING ON IN THIS THREAD???

>>9
hilarious, perfect parody of someone undereducated

That's pretty much the way science works. Take the Laws of Motion and The Laws of Thermodynamics for example. No one argues against them because the experimental evidence is too great. As a result, they're LAWS: undeniable statements about how reality works in certain situations and conditions. A theory is basically an assertion that MAY be true because it describes a POSSIBLE reason(s)for phenomena, but a law is an assertion that's determined to be true by virtue of repeated and rigorous testing by many scientists over the course of many years. During this time, every possible aspect and prediction is examined, reexamined, tested, and retested until no questions about it are left. For example: Say you throw a rock into the air and see it come back down. You then say: What goes up must come down. For that to be a law, everyone else has to test your idea by throwing rocks in the air. As long as everyone's rocks continue to come down, your assertion will become a law. If so much as one rock doesn't come down, your assertion remains a theory and has to be modified to account for the rock that didn't come down or replaced by an assertion that can account for it. Evolution, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics are just 3 of the theories that are in that state: much of what they say provides a reasonable explaination of what goes on, and some aspects of them have been proved, but much testing and modifying is still going on because scientists STILL have questions: We still need to clearly see one species of animal evolve into another(Evolution), still looking for the subatomic particle responsible for gravitational interaction(Relativity, Unified Field Theory), need to catch a particle existing in all its possible states at once or catch one "instantly transmitting" information(Quantum Mechanics). And there's plenty more questions I can't even think of.

I may be undereducated, but there's no mistaking the difference between a theory and a law: Theories are unproven or underproven while laws are unquestionable.

>>13
As long as you understand that if evidence is found against it then you don't scrap the theory entirely, like everyone seems to think about darwinist evolution.

It really seems like as soon as we find something that evolution doesn't describe ENTIRELY satisfactorily everyone will jump ship to creationism. Which would be stupid. The current theory may not be 100% correct but it's highly likely that it's quite close to the truth.

The same can be said for GR. There is an awful lot of experimental evidence that supports it. It would be unlikely if a completely unrelated theory was able to explain it all so well. It may not be complete but it is a step in the right direction.

>>14
No, you are repeating something that is often said in a high school science class, but is just not actually true.  In science, things that are called laws are called laws because somebody decided to call a principal a law.  Laws are not things that theories may someday grow up to be, the word law is just something we've inherited for refering to certain apparently basic scientific principles that can be stated fairly briefly.

Your use of the word theory is not the scientific use, but rather the use that the general public has come to use.  To the general public, a theory is an unproven idea.  In science, a theory is a framework that collected facts and observations can fit into.  A scientific theory is not a single hypothesis, but a conceptual framework that can include many equations and models (meaning descriptions of reality that are not necessarily complete or ultimately true, as nothing can be held to be ultimately true in science, example the many models of what atoms are like as atomic theory changed over time).  You don't ever prove a theory to call it a law, you test related hypotheses, continue to collect information and evidence, and modify the theory as a response to what you find to be statistically significant.

Quoting wiki: Physical laws are distinguished from scientific theories by their simplicity. Scientific theories are generally more complex than laws; they have many component parts, and are more likely to be changed as the body of available experimental data and analysis develops. This is because a physical law is a summary observation of strictly empirical matters, whereas a theory is a model that accounts for the observation, explains it, relates it to other observations, and makes testable predictions based upon it. Simply stated, while a law notes that something happens, a theory explains why and how something happens.

I'll stand corrected on the difference between a theory and a law, but it still leaves me with the same thought that anyone who wants to can disregard or disrespect a theory BECAUSE it is always under revision and retesting, regardless of how useful it has been in giving a useful framework for understanding how things are. Of course, to mangle an old saying: those who can't do, criticize! Which is all I can say about whoever called Relativity "bullshit".

As for Evolution versus Creationism, there is one thing they both seem to agree on to me: first comes the Earth, then comes the plants, next the animals, and then finally man. Evolution says all life sprang from a common genetic origin (genes that mutated and gave rise to diffent species over the millenia), and Creationism (as it exists today in its monotheistic state) says all life sprang from a common god. I wonder what we'd all say if we were to positively discover that the truth was somewhere in the middle?

>>17
If people disregard theories because of the name, that's not a fault of the name, it's a fault of them not understanding what theory means. Theories are so much bigger than facts; theories comprise THOUSANDS of facts.

Take Atomic Theory for example. In any high school level science or physics class, you'll learn about Atomic Theory. With Atomic Theory, we've been able to build a worldwide power grid. Home electronics. Microprocessors. Nuclear reactors. We went to the moon for fuck's sake.

They're never going to change that to "Atomic Fact". Theory means so much more than fact.

As for Evolution versus Creationism, there is one thing they both seem to agree on to me: first comes the Earth, then comes the plants, next the animals, and then finally man.
Please go die. Religion is a fairy tale, and nothing is more insulting to knowledge than such gross oversimplifications of evolution for the sole purpose of forcing an agreement with religion.

Besides, that statement isn't even true. The Bible presents an order of creation that is totally contrary to evidence:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/gen/1_1.html

I wonder what we'd all say if we were to positively discover that the truth was somewhere in the middle?
WE'VE ALREADY POSITIVELY DISCOVERED the truth. It's evolution. There is a staggering MOUNTAIN of evidence for this fact. Why would it be somewhere "in between" when there's no reason whatsoever for the biblical account to be true?

Religious idiots, get the FUCK out of /sci/.

>>17
It's true, you don't have to consider anything in science as absolutely certain, though we can come to be very confident in particular knowledge over time.

The way science works is that can't use faith as a virtue, because we can't say that our facts come from gods, never to be affected by future findings.

Thanks for the link. However, a quick look at Genesis shows the Earth formed after light (verses 9&10). Verse 2 said the Earth DIDN'T HAVE A FORM AND WAS VOID. As for the idea of animals before plants, I'm not sure if the one-celled organisms could definitely be called animals if they were taking in carbon and giving off oxygen (animals take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide). Of course, since animals came from some of the same one-celled organisms, maybe in that sense they both appeared simulaneously and the fossil record just makes it LOOK as if one came before the other.

Calm down, I was just speculating. No one really knows what happened anyway. If anyone does actually know, that person is keeping it to himself, or else no one is believing him as everyone else is either posing theories or advocating religion.

>>20
[...] as everyone else is either posing theories or advocating religion.
Did my entire post >>17 just go right the fuck over your head? Evolution is not just some people "posing theories". A theory is not something a bunch of idiots cooked up after a hard night of drinking.

Darwin didn't just come up with evolution one day; he decided to experiment with hereditary traits through various species, and eventually realized the truth through evidence. More importantly, HE DIDN'T WANT IT TO BE TRUE, because he was religious. But the INCREDIBLE MASS OF EVIDENCE he was uncovering slowly drew him away from religion and essentially destroyed his life, because his religious friends and family (especially his wife) hated him and turned away from him for it. He would have given anything for it not to be true, but he couldn't ignore what he was seeing.

Darwin didn't dream up evolution without any evidence. The evidence came first, and it was undeniable. That's just what Darwin accomplished in a few decades, with essentially no modern  knowledge of DNA or microbiology. Think of what we've accomplished in the past hundred and fifty years.

Was Newton just "posing theories" when he came up with gravity? Or could it actually be true? Why do you lend gravity so much more credit than evolution? They're both "just theories" after all.

>>21
Oops, I meant >>18, not >>17.

Newton WAS posing theories, however he was able to back up what he said with experimental evidence that people could reproduce. Unfortunately, no one that I know of can reproduce the evolution of life, only infer it's occurence through the fossil record. That's one reason the creationists can get away with bashing evolution(aside from constitutional freedom of expression). The moment somebody does a lab experiment where they make one species evolve into another or document such a thing CURRENTLY happening in the wild(no fossils; actual live animals), creationists will once again have to shut up and revise their stance(the last incident I remember hearing about had something to do with Galileo, the Catholic Church, and whether or not the sun revolved around the Earth--Galileo won, but the church just changed their stance and probably went looking for other targets; if there are more instances of this, I missed them). I've a feeling they're good at that.

Of course Darwin was religious, a lot of great scientists are or were religious: Rather that use their ideas to prove or disprove god, they use them to show us the wonder of what is and how best to use that knowledge. Unfortunately, everyone else decided the best use was to make more and better weapons and to attack religion: either to try to take its place(wanting the same control of the hearts and minds and donation money of the masses) or to shut them up because church's moral doctrines(no killing, stealing, etc...) show some people in a BAD light(talk about the pot calling the kettle black: religious leaders do their fair share of dirt too). However, my point once again, is that theories, however useful, however compelling, do NOT have to be taken as irrefutable facts by people who don't want to BECAUSE they are still works in progress with kinks that have still to be worked out(they're always under revision and retesting as scientists look for, and find, more evidence to either prove or disprove various aspects of any given theory) before concrete laws can be stated. It was NOT my intent to say creationism up and down with evolution or any other theory.

And don't worry about a wrong link, at least you can do one. I'm still figuring out how.

>>23
(not >>21)
What you're demanding isn't something evolution promises. Believe or not, there are actually things that happen over such time spans as no human could ever observe them with his own eyes. What we can  observe is micro-organism colonies that, when separated, develop along distinct paths and pests/diseases that develop resistance to chemicals previously effective at killing them, which, along with the logic of the whole process, is more than enough if you're not emotionally dependent on the whole God thing.

You need to learn the difference between a scientific law and a scientific theory - I won't do your Googling for you, but it should suffice to say that the common and scientific uses of the word 'theory' are two very different things. The latter shares none of the implied unsureness that goes with the former and requires a great deal more work before it comes into existence.

Final note: there is no large 'creation science' community of scientists who have intelligently rejected evolution. It's in all the textbooks because it's good science and you'd be hard-pressed to find an accredited university or significant research center with a single one of these nutjobs. All there is is a minority that is as vocal as it is small.

(You just type >>number for those things.)

>>23
lol fruit flies

Adaptation where you develope some traits or lose some traits, but still remain essentially the same species wasn't the type of evolution people were arguing over I thought. If I'm mistaken, I'm mistaken(Was that what you were describing?).
Humans might not live long enough to see species-into-another-species type evolution, but we do have the technology to record images and biological data to pass from one generation of observers to another.
My concept of a theory may not be as sharp as that of a lot people here, but would I be wrong in saying that a theory is a possible, plausible explaination of a known fact or relation between known facts, while at the same time NOT being a known fact itself(the theory)? If that's the case, the part about not being a known fact itself is what leaves theories fair game for naysayers. That's why the nutjobs are so loud(Fortunately, no one has to agree with THEM either!). To use >>1's question, how do you shut them up? I currently can only think of 2 ways: Show a theory to be irrefutable fact, or challenge them to offer a better theory based on known facts.

>>26
There is no such thing as a "known fact" which makes predictions.

Then someone should invent one.