51% of Americans don't accept the Big Bang theory

Hardly.

 

And the professor was basically right. If evidence had proven the existence of ether than physics was basically done but that didn't happen and science BRANCHED OUT. We didn't abandoned Newtonian physics, additions were made. What we didn't do is abandoned Newtonian physics. Creationist basically want to throw out the entire book of science and that will never happen.

 

The good news is that confidence (or not) in evolution or the Big Bang will have virtually no effect on how most people live their everyday lives.

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that's because if scientist went away and took the science away with them from everybody else there'd be a riot!
Just after half the population died from illness and teh other tries to figure out how not to starve to death in a week.

 

I don't get it. Are you saying there will be riots if enough people don't believe in the Big Bang?

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I think he's confusing science with technology.

 

Here's Stephen Jay Gould on what I mean:

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html

It is a fact--in the exact sense I posted earlier--that we know biological evolution exists and all researchers accept it, the underlying mechanism are theorized, and we do not have all the answers. As he says, even a fact in itself is not absolute certainty, and a theory is an imperfect fact:

Underlined by me for emphasis.

RAMA

 

I think the hard data here is more interesting.

http://ap-gfkpoll.com/main/wp-conte...GfK-March-2014-Poll-Topline-Final_SCIENCE.pdf

 

"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
—William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, 1900

"The grand underlying principles have been firmly established...further truths of physics are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
—Albert Michelson

Well, you're in distinguished company. But don't be so certain about Einsteinian Relativity. The reasoning is circular and has many other problems—on top of which it is not actually used to solve real world problems. Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect was more important.

But—but—but atom bombs!

"Somehow the popular notion took hold long ago that Einstein’s theory of relativity, in particular his famous equation E = mc2, plays some essential role in the theory of fission. Albert Einstein had a part in alerting the United States government to the possibility of building an atomic bomb, but his theory of relativity is not required in discussing fission. The theory of fission is what physicists call a nonrelativistic theory, meaning that relativistic effects are too small to affect the dynamics of the fission process significantly."
—THE LOS ALAMOS PRIMER

 

And THIS is also a huge part of the problem.. a collossal misunderstanding of the word theory as it applies in colloquial language and scientific language.

A Theory in science is a proven fact, there is no doubt about it. It has been tested and independently verified by many scientists to the point where everybody agreed that the facts and the hypothesis match.

A theory in general language is something that could be a possibility but it's not proven or disproven yet.

Science sometimes comes up with such insane concepts that it's hard or impossible to understand for a non-science oriented person.

For example it is said that all the matter of the universe was concentrated in an object as large as a ball but when a normal person thinks about it it can break one's mind when you think about the scope (they have a hard time grasping that such huge objects like suns can shrink down to sizes as small as our moon after they die).

So the poll doesn't surprise when it comes to the outcome.. what's more frightening is the utterrejection of science at all, i.e. people don't nother learing about these things even if it would be a very basic article in a magazine that doesn't even go into specifics such as a scientific publication would do.

Science has the habit of challenging one's own preconceived notion on how life works, it is constantly evaluating new facts as they become available which sometimes leads to e complete overturn of what once was thought to be the definite answer. Scientists accept that and they move on, a "normal" person has a hard time doing that especially if they were used to certain "facts" for their entire life only to be told that it was wrong so a conflict may ensue.

In this special case the US is really shooting its own foot by allowing to mix religion and science in schools.. e.g. creationism/intelligent design should never even have to entertained the thought to be mentioned in school yet people and organizations fought tooth and nail over it to be able to include it alongside biology and physics.
It has no place in school where young people should learn about the hard, verifiable facts and above all the scientific method because these are what our world was built on and are verifiable facts.

Religion, at best, should be taught in separate classes (such as it is done in Germany) because it deals in beliefs which in itself is not bad when it doesn't try to impose itself on facts. Religion is more than the literal bible, it is a way of life and it can coexist peacefully alongside science.

 

^Agreed, leave science to science classes as for religious and religious beliefs they should be left to reglious classes.

 

In that case though, how would you respond to the question: "Do you believe the Big Bang Theory is our current best explanation based on observable evidence for how the universe was created, though it could later be proven wrong?"

I would say, believing the evidence is incomplete is different from rejecting the theory.

Science should be taught in school, religion should be taught in Sunday school.

 

I would have to disagree with that. A theory is something accepted as fact until something better comes along.

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That evolution is an ongoing process is pretty much proven. If you don't believe in that, take one flu vaccine then never take another for the rest of your life: You won't need it.

One that's harder to definitively prove is that evolution was the mechanism for the genesis of man, that life sprang from no life just because amino acids and phospholipids were splashing around in primordial goo. That is the explanation that best explains observable evidence, but the experiment to prove it was possible would last billions of years.

 

Theories and facts are very different. Facts are more observational data, real-world things that have to be explained by a theory, which is a construct of the mind - an idea that would best explain all those observations (facts). A theory can range from well confirmed (evolution, relativity) to not confirmed at all (string theory). In some uses a theory is an upgrade from the hypothesis (a maybe), which is an upgrade from a conjecture (what if).


A scientific law is generally just a mathematical relation found in a set of observations, usually without a lot of deep reasoning as to why the relation seems to hold, just that nature seems to enforce the relation for some reason. Sometimes laws hang around even after violations are found, because they remain some general usefulness, such as Stefan-Boltzman's law relating radiation to temperature (which predates quantum mechanics and thus can't explain why your laptop screen isn't 6000 degrees Kelvin). Some hang around long after they've failed, just because they're historically useful or handy rules of thumb, like Bode's law for planetary distances.

 

A hypothesis becomes a theory when all of the experimental evidence supports it. When someone says something is "just a theory" they don't realize what they're really saying is "all the evidence points to you being right."

 

So multiverse theory, string theory, and panspermia theory are already proven?

What about phlogiston theory, caloric theory, miasma theory, luminiferous aether theory, and steady state theory, which are still called scientific theories long after they were falsified?

 

Re:

Well that's bad for the show then. Will it be cancelled now?

 

More misuses of the word theory. Like "intelligent design theory," which also is not a theory.

 

Because Multiverse Hypothesis is too many damn syllables.