mordrene wrote:
I feel i have somehow caused this 9 page rant. so might as well fire it up again.
I found this sight and i think it sums up my point of view. Looking at the science, one cannot prove either way if the globe is cooling or warming, period.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/arti ... 034077.cms
this one is a personal rant. someone earlier said leave math to mathmaticians and the climate to climatologists. so what do climatologists use to predict things, the psychic network, tarot cards, reading the bones? they use math. all science breaks down to math. Biology is applied chemistry. Chemistry is applied physics. Physics is the laws of the "known universe" as defined by math. so to say leave math to the mathmaticians is just silly. since tax day cometh, ask your accountant how they think of math. how about the computer designer who designed the computer that you used to make that silly statement. i bet they think maf is dumb.
another way to lool at it may be summed up by this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVnkd7ot_pw
sorry for the rant, i need to get that one out.
Cool video but that article is more or less a rehash of Crichton's speech. Strickingly similar discourse, too similar...
I agree, math is the language of all science but it's not the same as other experimental sciences that use this language to quantify their observations. If taken alone, math would serve very little purpose much like the alphabet means little if it's not used to write books...
Quote:
The "scientific facts" were found to be outright fabricated lies.
I'll be speaking from personal experience as a novice researcher (so consider the following as my opinion), I think one of the great problems of contemporary science (in the past, there was a time when the products of science were seen more as curiosities than useful tools) is that most of its funding now comes from private interests. As a chemist, I have witnessed an increasing involvement of the private sector in the few years I have occupied this function and it has me very worried. Although political interests may (probably?) also play by those same dubious rules, it has come to a point during my graduate studies where some of my student colleagues were actually used as "cheap" (students are obviously offered a small fraction of the money given to industry researchers to get the same work done) labor by pharmaceutical companies, only to name that specific example. Those students actually had their company's logo displayed on their lab doors.
At first, it sounded as some sort of a publicity stunt but I soon found out that the same students couldn't publish their results neither in scientific journals nor even in their own thesis in order not to infringe their sponsor's patents and confidentiality agreements. Because of our lack (at least, in Canada) of public funding, companies are allowed to fill the gap and use public money and infrastructures to further their lucrative causes even though our universities are supposed to promote independent academic research pursuits to be publicly disclosed.
Although some might say that it's a good thing to have graduate college students work on projects which could have imminent industrial applications, it has come to a point where it clearly concentrates the focus of the researchers mainly on those subjects which are now obviously favored over pure academia. For example, we are now working on many nanotechnology related projects which are in fact abusive language (in the case of chemistry, you could argue that the whole field is about nanotechnology since most molecules are of the appropriate nanoscale). The popular nano terms are simply used to get more attention and funding.
Having the industries picking and choosing what are the "relevant" research subjects sure isn't in the public's interest for it is impossible to forsee the future applications of a given technology (similarly to what Crichton wrote) even if, at first, it seems to be useless. I think it would be pretty safe to guess that the discoverers of the microwaves didn't anticipate that we would all be cooking some of our food with them and walking around with cellphones in their near future. As much as I do agree with Crichton's proposition on holding independent double-blinded research methods in order keep them unbiased, I fear that it is as utopic as wishing for all countries to live in peace and harmony... I am afraid that, until realistic solutions can be found, the value of scientific findings has to be held to even more suspicion than the level skepticism required by science depending on whom brings them forth to the public. In other words, a scientist on the payroll of a tobacco company can't really be found to be a credible source of information on smoking even though he might well be the only source...
It's really disappointing to me, as a young scientist of an unrelated field, to find so many inconsistencies and incongruities in the research being done on (potentially?) important topics such as global warming after having superficially read more on the subject over the span of these last few days. Science and all scientists may end up being victims of their own hyperspecialization since they now have to rely on each other for knowledge on topics unrelated to their work (in his time, Newton could learn about all of the known science but, today, it would be humanly impossible for him to do the same). Unfortunately, if global warming ends up to really be a conspiracy and/or blunder of the scientific community (from which I (maybe naively) expect(ed) more), some opportunistic people (which were also involved?) will probably (certainly?) rejoice and seize the occasion to further their own egoistical goals while tring to discredit science as a whole. In my opinion, this is going to be a turn for the worst because, unlike science, the opportunists are never held accountable for their actions since they don't rely on facts in the first place...
Sorry for the lengthy rant...
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