Apostate1970

you know, i have no idea whatsoever where or how you come up with all of this about "my will changing reality" and "proving that black is white" and so forth and all of that madness. my post was a clear response to agrajag's post. you appear to have not understood or not cared about what was under discussion there. you say that there is consensus in the scientific community (or anywhere else) about how to use the word "theory". but there is not and neither is there any imperative that there be. that's a plain fact that i and others have made very clear. there's some reason that you choose to ignore that fact and i tried to anticipate what that was but, ultimately, it's not incumbent on me to figure out what the nature of your confusion or the cause of your dissonance is. i mean, rereading your post you talk about things like "the king of science" and, quite honestly, it isn't clear to me from the rest of your post that you intend that ironically. so i think that pretty much speaks for itself.

i have no further response to this thread until and unless a new question or issue is raised that hasn't already been decisively addressed.

Apostate1970

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The Dagda

Yes ultimately its not incumbent on you to face reality. Hope that works out for you, if the definition of terms don't matter to you then aren't you simply trying and failing to redefine something to support your argument? Because if that's derregeur here I can win every argument ever, it'll be fantastic. So let me know. Your mission for today - should you chose to accept it - is to ask The Oxford English Dictionary to change its definition of theory to, the scientific community does not generally accept that a theory needs evidence. And what's entirely ironic is that if it didn't have that standard as default we wouldn't even be having this discussion because there'd be no contention. This is the bit that I find most entertaining. Lol.

Theory, hypothesis are used in non-technical contexts to mean an untested idea or opinion. A theory in technical use is a more or less verified or established explanation accounting for known facts or phenomena: the theory of relativity. A hypothesis is a conjecture put forth as a possible explanation of phenomena or relations, which serves as a basis of argument or experimentation to reach the truth: This idea is only a hypothesis.

Here knock yourself out with this one too I'm sure if you waffle enough about conjugations or some shit you can rewrite this to mean anything you like also.

Yes there is a consensus how to use the word theory you are wrong, you are very very very very wrong and you have no idea what you are talking about. You are trying to make out with a minority opinion as if your views reflect reality and they don't they simply aren't reflective of modern science, science 400 years ago maybe, you are so wrong in fact that if you fell out of a wrong satellite and plummeted to the ground through an atmosphere of 100% wrong you couldn't be more wrong.

I would advise you not come to threads making preposterous arguments and then refusing to justify them too with anything but ah yes look the dictionary is wrong, and this is not conventionally accepted, but that'd be a waste of time. You might want to actually read and understand Popper too, because you really have lost the plot. Do you really expect people to burn their dictionaries and educational material that defines - quite categorically I thought - scientific theory on your say so? Are you that convinced by your sloppy equivocations? Because I can assure you it is just you.

No you meant decisively abused.

Thank fucking Christ for that, I don't think anyone will be disappointed about you going away, I'm sure most people are bored of this abject nonsensensical whimsy of yours. I suggest that you actually meet and or work with a few scientists before you start dictating what it is they should believe at the very least you should learn about what people are taught at various levels of education about how they should work and the reality of that field. Because an intrinsic part of scientific education is being repeatedly told to back up speculation, to repeat experiments, to validate your opinions with related and supporting evidence and to subject yourself to criticism of your data. It's so fundamental to the process of living and working in the field that the only way you can avoid it is to go into a purely mathematical field. So why you insist on saying scientists generally are sloppy about what they accept as a theory and any old shit will do, is beyond me because that's not what happens, science needs evidence, theory needs evidence, science cannot and does not work on speculation alone and it does not hand out the title theory to unsubstantiated fancies. Although last night I dreamt that the universe was made up of tiny vibrating bananas in an ether of custard, I've just rounded off the calculus and vector transforms, I should subject my theory to Nature asap so that they can hail me as the greatest thing since sliced bread, since you're so sure that any old bs can pass muster evidence or not. You simply don't understand the distinction between theory and theory in laymens terms and no amount of links or categorical authorities stating the convention: theory and its usage is going to convince you that science has a different standard, so lets not waste your time shall we, you can believe whatever you like but it doesn't make it real.

Antiplastic

You know, the first 538 times you repeated it without addressing other people's arguments, it wasn't plausible to me, but the 539th time won me over.

Antiplastic

Have I really been so unclear that my views are a mystery on this?

Calling a theory not a theory is pointless (one might even say "just semantics") if all you want to do is say you don't like it.

Why don't you post a thread titled "Hay Guyz Everyone Lets All Slag Off On String Theory"? At least then you'd have a chance of actually discussing the merits.

crispy

Spaghetti theory.

Since spaghetti are just long strings - another piece of evidence for FSM

The Dagda

Here I go again, your arguments are facile and aren't worth addressing because you are making it up as you go along, really they are waffle, you might want to address a few dozen dictionaries and ask why they have wrongly defined your word, that you apparently own, before you start arguing the toss. See most people accept that the dictionary has the authority to define a word on a concensus of terminology basis, usually someone says theory means this according to x,y,z and we accept that, you apparently appear to want to forgo the terminology as it is accepted. You see and that's kind of a waste of everyones time, if you can't agree what something means, there's no point in talking about anything. Unless its standard procedure when you mess up and talk crap to try to redefine words to suit your argument, the ultimate form of plea bargaining with reality. Is that clear? But more importantly and I can't get enough of saying this, really, you are wrong, if God came down and shouted for eternity at you that you were wrong and that your full of shit arguments are worthless you couldn't be more wrong? Why answer what is patently drivel? When I have access to a perfectly good dictionary that denies everything you claim. Just saying there is no convention because you say so, in your microcosm of academia is worth nothing. Get it? It's the way it is. The scientific world demands experimentation, it demands evidence and falsifiability as a prerequisit of the term theory. It does, how many links do you want to read before it filters into that brain that actually this has been a long settled and accepted benchmark since the 19th century and even before.

Your wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Lol.

In science a theory must be supported by evidence or it is not a theory. Is that clear or do you want to argue that black is white some more, so that people can have a good chuckle.

Antiplastic

Now now, you know that simply isn't true.

Google scholar returns 85,100 hits on "RNA world hypothesis" and 57,700 hits on "RNA world theory".

It also returns 3,930 on "Snowball Earth Hypothesis", and 7,530 on "Snowball Earth Theory".

Oh my stars and garters! It appears that actual scientists doing actual science don't have a standardized nomenclature on this, and are perfectly capable of having reasoned discussions with a minimum of insults and run-on sentences.

Once again, you wobble here between theses. This could all be cleared up if you would take a deep breath and answer my simple request for clarification:

Once again you have to get clear on what you're claiming -- whether "the consensus" (a plurality of physicists? 51%? a supermajority?) thinks it's 1) not a widely accepted scientific theory 2) not a good scientific theory, because it's so hard in practice to test, 3) not even a scientific theory, but rather a mathematical or even philosophical one, or 4) not even a theory in any sense of the word.

The Dagda

Lol, lol.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Ok when you look a word up in the dictionary, do you usually spend hours trying to redefine it until it suits your reality? Lol your great, perhaps you should think about taking your show on the road.

You know nothing about science, stop pretending you have some magic window.

I don't need to answer your question and wont until you admit that in order for a theory to be scientific it needs evidence, until we can agree on the terminology there's little point in me discussing your questions as we are both discussing two different things.

You appear to have the definition of theory in science confused with theory in the lay community. Like I say until you accept that the nomenclature is there for a reason and that it is scrupulously adhered to within the formal halls of the institution there's no real basis for a discussion.

Oh and you might want to check actual scientific archives. Not a medium where every web site is open to the lay community and they rewrite it according to their whim. It's not really very revealing to cite google as the consensus of the scientific community, in fact its down right absurd. Anyone can post any crackpottery they like in google scholar. By that comparison I could assert that Pluto was a planet because if I type in planet pluto in google scholar I get more hits than pluto dwarf planet.

Interestingly its actualy 17,500 to 1710 roughly ten to one in favour of pluto being a planet.

Google fight has spoken!!! Pluto is a planet again.

Antiplastic

A question is wrong. That's a first.

"I won't answer you until you admit I'm right"? Is that your final answer?

1) You were the one who linked to an article from a computer programmer on about.com.

2) No, you're thinking of wikipedia. Google Scholar is a search engine:

"What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research."

Oops.