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Just the 'Facts'...
23:32 Jul 26 2008
Times Read: 649

This is just a record of commentary ongoing in an online forum, pitting a college-trained botanist (scientist), against an Internet-assisted opponent. The topic is science and whether or not it is appropriate to call the fruits of science "facts". Botanist claims he can produce statements which are scientific facts.

Botanist wrote:

It is absolutely undisputeable that facts are used in science. Ill even provide more examples:

Beastt wrote: "indisputable"?

Botanist wrote:

Clouds contain water vapor.

Beastt wrote: Clouds might contain unburned products of combustion as in "clouds of smoke". They may contain only sand or dust (i.e. "clouds of sand", "clouds of dust"). While you most certainly knew the intention behind your statement, one who is unfamiliar with the information you hold might well misunderstand because your comments contain potential error. Why do you suppose theories are so carefully worded? And if someone were to take your comment, as it was presented, as a "fact", they would then be under the false impression that the huge billowing clouds of airborne dust in a dust storm contain only water vapor. You and I know they contain more than just dust and do contain a small amount of water vapor as water vapor is present in the atmosphere. But as you have phrased the comment, it cannot be considered accurate or factual. Ever hear of "clouds" of toxic gas? Also note that you have not included anything else that might be found in the type of clouds which I believe you were attempting to describe such as drops of liquid water, ice, dust, fish, frogs, leaves and on some very, very rare occasions, even people and planes. (Freak accidents have lead to skydivers being caught in the updrafts of clouds and even being coated with ice crystals.)

Are you not familiar with the "cloud" around the nucleus of an atom which consists of electrons moving at such a rate that they present a blurred cloud, rather than individual particles? There is no water in an atom.

Again, this is the problem when one attempts to assert "facts". You likely think I'm pushing to the extreme but that's the whole point of a "fact". It's suggested to be the most extreme form of accuracy, yet none of your statements comply with such a standard.

Botanist wrote:

The speed of light in a vacuum.

Beastt wrote: That's a partial statement. It presents nothing of substance; nothing of "fact". Are you talking about a total vacuum or a partial vacuum? What temperature is the vacuum? What level of gravitational force is crossing the path of the light? All of these things affect the speed the light travels.

Botanist wrote:

The universe is expanding.

Beastt wrote: We can observe a section of the universe approximately 28 billion light years in diameter. What lies beyond that we cannot know, but there is no evidence to suggest that there isn't a vast expanse of universe beyond that point. So what we can say with credible veracity is that the evidence demonstrates that the universe in the area we can see, appears to be expanding. What is happening in the portions of the universe which remain beyond our observation, we can't say. We have no evidence which suggests the universe beyond our observation is shrinking, but that doesn't mean that it isn't. And if we can observe only a small percentage of the universe, it might well be shrinking in the remainder of the universe which is beyond our observable range. Were that to be the case, the universe might actually be shrinking in overall size, but expanding only in our small area or several such small areas. You don't know that not to be the case, so it's not factual to claim the universe is expanding. Perhaps what we see in our small area (the area we can observe), is but an oscillation wave such as might move through a cube of Jell-O. Do you know without any cause for doubt that this isn't the case? If there is any potential (and there is), that the expansion we observe is isolated to our area or several small areas, then we have cause to doubt that your statement is of the ultimate veracity.

Botanist wrote:

Stars are made of gas.

Beastt wrote: Astronomers draw conclusions regarding the composition of stars by studying the spectrum of light energy they emit. Even if we look only to the visible region (4000 to 7000 angstroms), we find thousands of absorption lines which produce evidence of 67 different elements. The ten most common are hydrogen, helium, silicon, oxygen, iron, carbon, nitrogen, magnesium, neon, and sulfur.

Botanist wrote:

When I look at the ground I can count the number of adult plants.

Beastt wrote: This would require you to cover every square inch of ground for the whole of the Earth, or even other planets, should we find any, where plants grow and mature. Can you actually count that high? Will you live long enough to finish the count? Again, I understand the basic premise of your statement. But your statement cannot credibly be called a "fact".

Botanist wrote:

And you claim I am the one who doesnt know what a fact is?

Beastt wrote: This is where you keep missing the proper word. I keep "demonstrating" that you don't seem to understand what a "fact" is and why science finds it appropriate to avoid the use of such a word. Instead it defines "Scientific Laws" and adjusts them as necessary to retain consistency with what we observe of reality. It develops "Hypotheses", based on evidence which must then be tested against all pertinent known evidence by those attempting to challenge the veracity of the hypothesis before it becomes a "Theory". And "theory" is where it stops. There is nothing above theory in the scientific hierarchy of credible veracity. We can know this because theories grow, adapt, change and mutate to maintain the best possible description of the mechanism of reality which they attempt to explain. And on very, very rare occasions, they are even abandoned when new evidence shows them to be so far from factual that they cannot be adjusted to bring them back in parallel with what we observe in reality.

Remember that in the years of Einstein's early U.S. career, it was though to be true that the universe was stagnant and unmoving. Because Einstein accepted this as a "fact" of science, when his calculations suggested an apparent expansion, he developed what he called a "cosmological constant", which he applied to each of his calculations to accommodate an unexpanding universe. Once the evidence offered a conclusion that the universe in the observable region was indeed expanding, Einstein began to refer to his "cosmological constant" as one of the greatest blunders of his career. Everything in science must be open to continual study, refinement, adjustment and correction. Thusly, one should never refer to any presently accepted conclusion of science as a "fact", simply because we cannot know that it is not without error.

Look, I'm not here to introduce renal contamination to your breakfast of champions. I made a simple and accurate statement and you chose to challenge me. Now you leave me in the position of having to continually bat away at your attempts to support a falsehood or to simply walk away, leaving others to believe that your falsehood was indeed correct. Keep trying and eventually you'll present a statement that I cannot demonstrate to be other than absolutely factual. But I'm not a scientist nor do I claim to be. Perhaps another member of the forum will walk up and cut your statement to ribbons, even after I'm left without a response. The focus for you is simply this; we cannot "know" that any conclusion of science is entirely without error. The conclusions of science are based on evidence and there is never a way to know that we have discovered absolutely all of the pertinent evidence which might affect the conclusion drawn. Keeping that in mind, it is a practice of disingenuousness to proclaim that any of these conclusions are devoid of potential for error. Thusly, they do not qualify as "facts". And yet, science does perfectly well without producing facts. It actually does quite well when you consider the number of errors it holds in its history. But this is due to the capacity of science to accept errors, make adjustments, re-group and continue forward. Were science to need to establish "facts" before it could advance, it would be as static as it once considered the universe to be.

This is a very common misconception about science. But the reality is that science does not produce facts, nor does it operate on proofs. Science operates on evidence and produces conclusions consistent with the best available observations of the presently available evidence. As the observations are refined and expanded, and as new evidence is discovered, the conclusions based on those observations of evidence will, from time to time, require adjustment. We've seen this with the "Theory of Gravity", the "Theory of Evolution", various conclusions in the field of paleontology, Einstein's own "Theory of Relativity" and many other places. All of these theories were sufficiently accurate to allow scientific discoveries to grow but none of them are considered to be absolutely factual and without room for improvement by credible scientists.

Unless we can be certain that we have gathered all of the potential relevant evidence concerning any mechanism or property of reality, we cannot state with perfect confidence that the conclusions we've drawn on the available pertinent evidence are without potential for some level of error. And as long as a potential exists for some level of error, we cannot credibly and genuinely proclaim our conclusions to be "facts", lest we lose the purpose of such a word.

COMMENTS

Joli
08:26 Jul 29 2008

If I haven't told you lately that you're brilliant, allow me to remind you now. In the vernacular, "you made plant boy yo bitch!"

Joli
06:00 Jul 30 2008

"Beastt wrote: This would require you to cover every square inch of ground for the whole of the Earth"

What about water plants, especially the microscopic plants like phytoplankton? Hydroponic plants? Greenhouse and other potted plants? So many questions!

DuCroix
08:42 Jul 30 2008

Wow, I've never seen someone ground down so neatly. Nice :D

Beastt17
09:25 Jul 30 2008

I mentioned single-celled plants and he correctly pointed out that these (usually algae), are more properly classified as Protists (still in the plant kingdom but I gave him the point). He mentioned Wolffia and suggested that the smallest such plants were around 4mm in size and still small enough for him to spot and count accurately. I remembered seeing something on Wolffia eing significantly smaller, researched it, and found that even when flowering, it can be no more than .6mm in size. He countered that he'd simply forgotten his decimal point. I let it go.

DarkCthulhu
11:01 Jul 30 2008

Hulk smash!! Heh, nice job.