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Goodbye Jesus

science meets religion


pantheory

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kind of hilarious :)

 

 

 

Credit :  dark matter - tribunedigital-thecourant

 

 

Of course most cosmologists believe that there are many reasons to justify the existence of dark matter, but other theorists including myself assert that it does not exist.

 

https://www.space.com/4554-scientists-dark-matter-exist.html

 

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-reasons-we-think-dark-matter-exists-a122bd606ba8

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Please make good on your unsupported assertion that religion is involved here, Pantheory.

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

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For some reason this cartoon link below was omitted from the original posting several times.

 

probably my ineptitude somehow. 

 

http://articles.courant.com/2013-04-04/news/hc-dark-matter-20130404_1_dark-matter-theories-samuel-ting

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@pantheory Your linked article has this line "They (Scientists) depend on empirical evidence to prove their theories. Otherwise, they remain theories and not facts. Dark matter is still a theory." I'm about a Y11 on science knowledge, but even I know that saying something in science is "just a theory" indicates that said person doesn't understand what science is. It's like the old Christian creationist attack "Evolution is just a theory". A theory is a body of knowledge to explain observed phenomena. It is made up of facts, explanations, experiments etc. 

 

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So at which point would dark matter not be a theory? It doesn't matter how well its proven its still going to be a theory. The person in the article in post #3 doesn't seem to know what they are talking about.

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@pantheory Your linked article has this line "They (Scientists) depend on empirical evidence to prove their theories. Otherwise, they remain theories and not facts. Dark matter is still a theory." I'm about a Y11 on science knowledge, but even I know that saying something in science is "just a theory" indicates that said person doesn't understand what science is. It's like the old Christian creationist attack "Evolution is just a theory". A theory is a body of knowledge to explain observed phenomena. It is made up of facts, explanations, experiments etc. 

 

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So at which point would dark matter not be a theory? It doesn't matter how well its proven its still going to be a theory. The person in the article in post #3 doesn't seem to know what they are talking about.

 

"So at which point would dark matter not be a theory? It doesn't matter how well its proven its still going to be a theory. The person in the article in post #3 doesn't seem to know what they are talking about."

 

Yes, scientific theories and hypothesis are not fact as you aptly pointed out. Theories may contain fact but they are not fact themselves. I do not even call "dark matter" a scientific theory, I refer to it as a hypothesis. The distinction between the two is how much evidence supports the conjecture, how much of its support can correctly be considered direct evidence? how much of it contains experiments rather than just debatable interpretations of observations? etc.

 

I agree. The quote made in the link seems to imply that theory can be fact. Yes, some theories can become fact by discovery. Such a case was planet 8 in our solar system (before the discovery of Pluto), called a theory at that time. The theory was based upon the perturbations of planet Uranus but many astronomers had doubts. This so-called theory was later proven to be correct by the discovery of the planet Neptune.

 

The author's quote in the link is not a proper description of a scientific theory, as you pointed out. I will rephrase the quote at the bottom of this post and see if you generally agree with my statement instead. The statement in the comic was this:

 

".........They depend on empirical evidence to prove their theories. Otherwise, they remain theories and not facts."

 

More accurately it could be said that theory is based upon, and depends upon interpretations of observations, empirical evidence including experiments when possible, practical tests of some kind, diversity of the observations that it might explain: Can the theory make new predictions rather than regularly changing to accommodate new observations? Is the theory presently falsifiable? if not it is not a theory, just a hypothesis.

 

Theories are well-studied and tested structures of ideas that are proposed to explain and interpret facts that are  bolstered by numerous observations. A hypothesis is something more than just speculation but less than well-developed theory. There may be a number of competing hypothesis that could explain the same related observations. There may be many variations of the same general hypothesis, like baryonic or non-baryonic dark matter, cold or warm dark matter, gravity centered or non-gravity centered dark matter, but there should not be many variations of the same theory. Instead most variations of theory are often referred to as hypothesis relating to the theory. 

 

Yes, in the article of the comic the author should have instead said something like: Scientists depend on empirical evidence to further support their theories, not intuition and feelings.

 

 

 

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