12 Things Science Can't Explain

It amazes me that science can accept microscopic universes and even those aren't fully explainable. Yet, new concepts they are frightened to go near.

Microscopic universes require an open mind. I have viewed water bears under my microscope and they behave in a way that hasn't been documented. I have them herding togethor and feeding togethor and when they are are thier own they go into a type of hibernation. They are as real as we are, although we can't touch them so to speak.

We are made up of molecules and atoms. Actually, our physical bodies are just vessels to move about in.

I have had a NDE back in '99 and I don't fear death. I was according to the records 'dead'. My husband had been told to make the necessary arrangements 'ring the funeral home'.

Without oxygen, my brain was dead. I was fully concious and aware of where I was.

We are so much more than what we percieve ourselves to be. Science is afraid to take a leap of faith. Everything has to be rationalized and if it doesn't fit into thier mindset, it is unacceptable. They try to rationalize the unexplainable and some of thier theorys, I am afraid are laughable.

I don't knock science, as I am interested in biology myself, especially the water bears. However, I can look outside the box and take a leap of faith.

love, light and peace

I disagree, but with a condition. I honestly think that we can all be correct, yet all differ. You say science and religion are incompatible, but my most admired scientists were spiritual, like Einstein, Edison, Newton, etc. And I see countless crises growing out of control globally, which science seems bent on disproving, rather than acting. Technology was great while it lasted, its just too bad it isn't sustainable, like the Australian Aboriginal culture. The fact we are all different, and all have had different lives, leads me to conclude we all arrive at different worldviews, and whether they are atheistic, animist, religious, whatever, they can all be right.
Science has a rich history of killing people, such as the Tuskogee Syphilis horror, and the Nazi medical atrocities. Today, doctors regularly kill patients in there attempts to 'heal' them.
As for the post about gravity, it doesn't explain the night David Copperfield was floating around our local arena. And Criss Angel seems to be in violation of that law quite often too. Even David Blaine flirts with breaking the law of gravity by a few inches.

[edit on 03 22 2005 by BlackGuardXIII]

Why would you put word's in my mouth? I never said they were incompatable. I pointed out the difference's I've noticed. And yes, people have died because of science or as a result of experiment's gone wrong. BUT, please name one instance of a group of scientist's killing people simply because they didn't ACCEPT science. Right... And no, we can't all be correct. If that were true, then a previous poster's nut sack really is the center of the universe and you show get on your knee's and worship his holliness.

As for your magician's ... Grab any book on performing magic act's and yes, you too can "defy" gravity, tweak it a little tho so people can't figure out how your doing it as easily.

Got some thoughts both regarding the original post and some of the tangents that have emerged in discussion.

On the original post -- none of the things listed are intrinsically outside the bounds of science. If some of them can't be explained yet, that's no biggie. There are a number of assumptions under which science operates. One of them is that we don't, and never will, know everything.

I also don't think any of them portend a true scientific revolution of the magnitude of relativity, quantum mechanics, or chaos. All of the psi phenomena can be accounted for with a very simple concept: that probability is mutable, not fixed. That it is a genuine aspect of nature, not just a mathematical abstraction. Is that a major new concept? Yes, but not one that would invalidate anything in current theory. The non-psychic things mentioned would require, at most, a little mathematical tweaking.

There ARE some questions that are outside the bounds of science, though. These include all questions of value, such as: Is it right or wrong for me to do X? Am I in love with him/her? Am I being a good citizen/parent/spouse/friend? Do I like ice cream?

They also include questions of fact connected with two things: consciousness itself, and the universe as a whole. Why? Because science is dependent on observation, and observation requires the interaction of two things, an observer and something observed. Whenever observation takes place, consciousness is what is doing the observing, not what is being observed. We can never observe consciousness, cannot verify objectively that consciousness even exists (the poster who blithely stated that it emerges from brain activity was posting an assumption without evidence, not a proper conclusion), and therefore can say nothing (in the language of science) about what it is or where it comes from. As for the universe in toto, whenever you think you are observing that, you are actually observing, at best, the universe minus yourself as the observer. There is no standpoint from which you can observe the whole thing, no frame of reference in which to incorporate it.

Science is a method for dealing with every factual question between those two extremes.

About psi phenomena. It's interesting that there has been so much resistance in the scientific community to acceptance of the evidence for these phenomena. Complaints that psi experiments aren't replicable (they are and have been replicated in many cases multiple times), or that they depend on statistics for analysis (so do many other areas of study), are not rational nor sensible, and clearly disguise some non-scientific motivation. I think that is probably because so many scientists -- especially outside the field of physics, and we should remember that psi research emerged initially as a field of psychology -- still have not absorbed the philosophical ramifications of the physics revolution of the 20th century. They are still operating as what I call "classical materialists."

What is classical materialism? It is the philosophical belief that all of reality is material in nature, and that matter is essentially what common sense and ordinary perception would suggest. Physics today clearly shows that matter is NOT what common sense and ordinary perception would suggest, but this has not penetrated the philosophical understanding of many.

In a classical materialist view, matter is solid, precisely located, deterministic in its behavior, and mechanistic in a linear, predictable way. But according to physics theory today, matter is non-solid, located only as a probability distribution, indeterminate at its subatomic root, and for the most part behaves in a nonlinear, unpredictable way that is more like an organism than a machine. While quantum mechanics and chaos do not, by themselves, account for psi phenomena, they are much more friendly and permissive towards them than classical Newtonian mechanics. In the context of these theories, psi remains unmodeled, but it is not nearly as weird or threatening.

I myself subscribe to a philosophy that might be called non-classical materialism. I believe that all of observed, objective reality is material in nature, but concur with physics that the nature of matter is radically different from what common sense and ordinary perception would suggest. A common refrain of skeptics is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." But what makes a claim of psi phenomena "extraordinary"? Merely that it presents an impossible challenge, not to the structure of science, but to classical materialism. If psi is real, then either phenomena exist which are non-material, or else the nature of matter is radically different from what common sense and ordinary perception would suggest. But the second of those, we already know to be true! Yet the implications haven't percolated through all of our philosophical thinking.

To me, as a non-classical materialist, there is nothing "extraordinary" about a claim of psi phenomena. It is a perfectly ordinary claim, requiring only ordinary proof -- which has already been presented in abundance.

You want something weird to wrap your brain around? Someone already mentioned Schrodinger's cat paradox. Here's a description of the thought-experiment from whatis.techtarget.com...:



OK, even that is weird enough. But now consider this: Before the box is opened, the cat is both dead and alive from the point of view of the experimenter.

But that is not at all the case from the point of view of the cat! That cat, from its own perspective, is definitely either alive or dead, not both at once.

This is a type of "relativity" that Einstein never contemplated.

And if that's not enough to show that material reality is downright weird, and that classical materialism is thus a defunct philosophy, I don't know what would be.

THat is pseudoscience, not science.

News to me.

zebu.uoregon.edu...




Seems like a sound thought experiment to me.

[edit on 20-12-2005 by sardion2000]

I hope I got these quotes untangled correctly.

Okay, here's my layman's point of view on this one. Everybody, underline the word layman.

Aside from the sheer ugliness of said experiment, which no doubt gives the RSPCA an attack of apoplexy...

Just because the experimenter cannot see the cat, does not mean the cat is both alive and dead, it means the experimenter's (scientist, I guess) path of vision is blocked.

All this experiment seems to prove is that a human does indeed not possess Clark Kent-like abilities to see through solid objects unaided.

Once we put a remote camera with a broadcast antenna inside the steel chamber we can observe the cat and we know whether it is alive or dead at the moment change occurs.

Just because I cannot observe my ex-girlfreind from a distance of a couple of thousand kilometres does not mean she is both alive and dead at the same time, even if I were to wish her dead (which I don't). She is either alive or dead. I simply have no knowledge of which at the present time.

Only one answer is correct and as soon as we open the steel chamber we'll know which one.

Indeterminacy sounds like a fancy way of covering the fact that some people must be correct all the time, regardless of the position they take relative to the provable (and possibly observable) facts.

Remember,

Thought is crime, war is peace.

You're thinking too literally.

When they are talking about Indetermanacy they are really talking about this.

en.wikipedia.org...

And I believe that Schrodingers Cat was an attempt to highlight a potential problem a paradox if you will in the root of Quantum Theory(I believe, that is a Laymans opinion as well )

[edit on 20-12-2005 by sardion2000]

Yeah, don't try doing this one as a real experiment.



If you do that, then you're conducting a different experiment.

But you have a point. Schrodinger's thought-experiment isn't a perfect illustration of what he was getting at, because it IS possible to modify the experiment so that some of the indeterminacy is removed. Although it will still not be possible to predict the radioactive decay ahead of time, so the essence of it will not.

There are many processes in nature where modifying our observations to gain better knowledge is not possible. Consider a photon travelling from a flashlight, across a room, to impact a photoelectric cell. Once it impacts the photoelectric cell, we can determine its exact position. This is analogous to the cat's state of being alive or dead once we open the box. But before it hits the cell, we can only approximate its position and momentum, not determine them exactly; we can give the probability of it being located in one place or another, but not say with certainty which place it is. Nor can we remedy this ignorance by developing better measuring instruments. The ignorance doesn't arise from poor measurements, but from the intrinsic nature of a moving photon, which doesn't have an exact position and momentum, only a field of probable locations and probable momenta. This is analogous to the cat's state of being both alive and dead before opening the box.

Since the same rules apply to all subatomic particles, not just photons, and since all matter is composed of such particles, it is also not possible to determine the exact location and momentum of a larger object that we can see. We can ballpark it well enough for most practical purposes, but it will still be a probability function, not a fixed value.

And the same goes for natural processes and their outcomes. The same indeterminacy that we find in the subatomic world prevails in the majority of macroscopic processes, too. Tiny subatomic uncertainties translate, not into tiny subatomic-particle-sized uncertainties in the macroscopic world, but into great big macroscopic uncertainties. (This is technically known as "inifinite sensitivity to initial conditions.") Only in a few processes, such as the orbits of the planets, or the swing of a pendulum, is the uncertainty suppressed (or rather, kept subatomic-sized). For the most part, nature is indeterminate. It can't be predicted how a process will come out. It's mechanistically dependent on its initial conditions, sure, and we know the equation that determines how a given set of conditions will manifest, sure. But right up until the outcome actually happens, the process doesn't even have an exact set of initial conditions, because they need to be met down to the subatomic level, and the subatomic level is characterized by uncertainty.

Einstein to the contrary notwithstanding, God plays dice with the universe.

Mrs. Schroedinger to Mr. Schroedinger: What the hell did you do to the cat? It looks half dead!


- - -


Wanted - Dead or alive -
Schroedinger's cat

I find little value in the point that in the syphillus deaths, scientists killed in the name of research, rather than because the victims did not accept science. It is still very evil either way.
I am sure the nutsack post was a joke, and I admit you could be right, but you seem to say there is no chance that I could be right about us all being just as correct.
I would love to find the book that explains flying around arenas before thousands of peoples eyes. And about tweaking gravity, even a little, too.