Thread: Sexy Science

Originally Posted by Spartiate

Aristotle was pretty much wrong about everything.

Pretty much everybody before the 18th century was wrong about everything. They had ideas that approached what we know today, but most of these scientists would be considered insane today. Philosophy was the only thing ancient Greece had going for them.

The Greek idea, though, embodied by Socrates and Euclid, of appeal to one's own experience and reason, rather than dogma, is probably the most important idea in human history.

Haha, I thought only our school watched Bill Nye.



He's the man.

No way Puffin, everyone did

Not only did I watch it in school, but I would eagerly wait until 4 PM to watch each episode on PBS.

Originally Posted by Xei

I used to have the same opinion as you, but it changed as I aged. The main source for my belief in Platonism as a teen was basically listening to Roger Penrose in a rather submissive manner, who talks about it a lot in his books; but as I became more accustomed to and knowledgeable about maths I changed my mind. I now think that mathematics is as empirical an endeavour as any other (that is to say, completely), and the only reason for its huge success is the same reason that science has been so successful. The fact that there exist multiple, contradictory mathematicses is one of the more perturbing arguments against their inherent truth. I'm reading Penrose on and off again at the moment, and now that I feel a bit more enlightened, and independently critical, the errors in his arguments are glaring.

Perhaps as I learn more about theoretical physics I'll change my mind again, but I'm yet to see anything that'd sway me. My tentative belief at the moment is that intelligence can only emerge in the first place in universes with a high degree of pattern and structure (so, an elaboration of the anthropic principle); this explains the success of induction and the beauty of what we may mistake for an underlying reality.

With respects to Kant; of course, he is not to blame (although it does show that at least some of his substantial arguments were actually assertions). I've mentioned before, in fact, how philosophy seems to diffuse through the mass consciousness, which explains why I have so many original thoughts, without overt external reference, which turn out to have been had before, and moreover made their originators very famous. Only last night I discovered a chief idea of mine (briefly that much of philosophy is based upon conflation of words) was the one of the major ideas that made Wittgenstein famous and has apparently been a basis for most contemporary philosophy. My awareness of non-Euclidean geometry was one of the major things that I'm conscious of having shaped my opinion, and probably shaped my thought processes systematically; if Kant were alive in modern times, perhaps his philosophy would be much the same as mine.

And my degree is in maths.

Penrose is way cool I haven't read anything by him yet though. While I would not consider myself a Platonist I do agree with his idea that maths is independent of the human mind. I think my main source of belief in this is from reading about Gödel (who was a Platonist) and his ideas on the existence of mathematical entities but then again Gödel was a mystic (not saying that automatically discredits him but it doesn’t help).

I actually have only recently become extremely interested in mathematics (like the past month) so my knowledge on the matter is limited and there was already a giant thread on the existence of mathematical entities so I wont try to hijack this thread but Ill make this quick . I think because maths is such a reliable tool for understanding and predicting phenomena in the universe that we should have a vested interest in the existence of maths entitites (Quine-Putnam argument). If maths is a human invention then we have built a castle in the sky so to speak (a non-existence foundation for our knowledge). Also the Fibonacci sequence is another good example because it is found so widely in nature. But I digress…

Ah man I hate when that happens. I’ve had a couple ideas as well that have already been articulated by others, it makes me very depressed but its cool I’m learning more everyday so I hope to have my own groundbreaking ideas soon. Good luck with the degree Im going to start college soon and Im thinking I want to major in physics so I have to get really good at math!

@Puffin- I grew up on Bill Nye as well, he's a swell fellow.

Also: LHC, Astrophysics, 'Dark Energy', Parallel Universe Theory, Quantum Physics, the Search for ET Life, etc.

Is Dark Energy "Antigravity" Leakage from an Adjacent Universe? We Might Know Soon.

Gigantic Star 150 Times Sun Found in Adjacent Galaxy

"100 Million Collisions per Second" -- CERN's Large Hadron Collider Smashes Closer to Unlocking Secrets of the Universe

Are Odds for Discovery of Life Unfolding Expontentially? Kepler's Prolific Discoveries of Multiple-Planet Systems

Why are Supermassive Black Holes at Galactic Cores Spinning Faster than Ever in the History of the Universe?

Hyper Evolution -- Human Population Growth is Accelerating Species Change

Weekend Feature -- A Radical Theory Asks: Are Stars at the Edge of the Hubble Universe Being Consumed by a Universe-in-Mass Black Hole?

Epic Discovery: New Galaxy Observations Proves Dark Energy Dominates the Universe

And so on, and so forth...

Doesn't get much sexier than that.

Originally Posted by Puffin

Haha, I thought only our school watched Bill Nye.

I can think of very few people I know, that probably have never seen Bill Nye the Science Guy. Everyone knows that show.
Also, he's still pretty popular with the kids. My 10 year old daughter thinks he's awesome.

I enjoy trying to imagine existing in 4d (4th spatial dimension not spacetime), it's one of my lucid goals.

Fourth Dimension: Tetraspace
YouTube - 4D

Aristotle invented formal logic, and his discussion of the "four causes" is still pretty sharp to this day IMO. Show him some love.

Aristotle's approach to knowledge set humans back a thousand years or so. It was only by attacking scholasticism, largely based on Aristotle's ideas, that the modern world came to be. The insistence that all knowledge is syllogistic is, firstly, extremely restrictive of the types of knowledge we can have, and, secondly, doesn't even give us correct knowledge (viz: the fire element has an inherent tendency to rise. The sun is made of fire. Hence, the sun rises above the Earth. The mistake of course being that there is absolutely no basis for the initial assertion that matter is made of four elements). Before the enlightenment, academia basically meant sitting around and making these absolutely trivial and worthless kinds of arguments. And one of Aristotle's four causes in particular was totally backward (namely that inanimate matter does what it does because it wants to achieve a goal).

Originally Posted by Pan

I enjoy trying to imagine existing in 4d (4th spatial dimension not spacetime), it's one of my lucid goals.

Fourth Dimension: Tetraspace
YouTube - 4D

Deducing what 4D space must be like comes pretty easily to a mathematician; I did it before I ever read about it. I built a representation of a 4D cube out of geomag.

The general method of thought instilled in you by doing math instantly suggests this approach:

Consider all known smaller cases.

0D: a point.
1D: a section of a line.
2D: a square.
3D: a cube.

Then just look for the pattern and perform induction. If you draw those things on a piece of paper, it's actually really clear: from each step to the next, you double the object, and then join up the pairs of corners.

Point: double it, join up the two points, you have a line. Line: double it, join up the two pairs of points on both ends of the line. Square: double it, join up the four corresponding points. Cube: yet again, clone the cube, and then connect the corresponding corners. Tada:



Incidentally, can anybody here tell me how they know that space is 3D? I think it's trickier than it appears.

+1 Kari Byron. She kept me watching mythbusters when it got boring.

As for science that is sexy, is it just me or does everyone who enjoys smoking Cannabis get turned on by the thought or pictures of it?
(It's science because of the horticultural aspect which has changed the plant dramatically).

Also, I get turned on thinking about how the universe, or everything, began.
Also M-theory.

The fact that we can actually create (not really but for ease of typing sake) electricity and use it in stuff. Fucking insane.

I saw this picture of an underground laboratory in COSMOS and it is set up with like 10000 little detectors and filled with 10000 gallons of water. Something like that anyway.
They are trying to detect neutrinos. And it's beautiful. It just makes me sad that only a very small number of people will ever see it in their life. The same with most amazing scientific equipment. Such as the nano particle blasters, lasers etc., the Very Large Telescope etc.

Does that Euler Disk have magnets underneath?
That pendulum turned me on too. Felt it in my loins.

EDIT: At first I couldn't think of anything, but now they keep coming lol
The fact that bacteria divide in to two.
The fact that cells replicate.
That we create Vitamin D from sunlight and plants create sugar.
We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, plants - vice versa.

I could go on. But it's 2AM almost.

Oh yeah, the fact that we have been on this Earth (organisms, not just humans) for probably 4 billion years, and suddenly within only the last 100 we have gone in to space and sent radio waves and probes millions of km away from Earth.

Originally Posted by tommo

I saw this picture of an underground laboratory in COSMOS and it is set up with like 10000 little detectors and filled with 10000 gallons of water. Something like that anyway.
They are trying to detect neutrinos. And it's beautiful.

That would probably be CERN's Large Hadron Collider. It's fucking awesome. Check out the link I posted above, talking about "100 Million Collisions Per Second"

Originally Posted by tommo

Does that Euler Disk have magnets underneath?

Nope, it's literally just a disk of metal.

Oh yeah, the fact that we have been on this Earth (organisms, not just humans) for probably 4 billion years, and suddenly within only the last 100 we have gone in to space and sent radio waves and probes millions of km away from Earth.

Yes, I find anthropology, human history, and the history of life extremely interesting. Here's a ridiculously amazing visualisation of the concept you're referring to:

Evolution Timeline - AndaBien - StumbleUpon

Lots of people disagree with me but I find that to be something that requires explanation. It is no doubt that intelligence experienced a paradigm shift with the emergence of homo sapiens, but why was it such a minuscule period of time ago, geologically?

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

That would probably be CERN's Large Hadron Collider. It's fucking awesome. Check out the link I posted above, talking about "100 Million Collisions Per Second"

Nope, it's a neutrino detector like he said.

Yet more raunchy physics: neutrinos! Neutrinos are very abundant particles, but they have very little charge or mass and so hardly interact at all with normal matter. Trillions of them are passing through your body every second, but they literally have no effects. They are the most pointless particle ever (and hence a good piece of evidence that, if God designed the universe for us, he also did everything he could to make it look like he didn't), and require huge underground equipment to see.



Incidentally, these inspired the asbestos spheres in Portal 2.

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

That would probably be CERN's Large Hadron Collider. It's fucking awesome. Check out the link I posted above, talking about "100 Million Collisions Per Second"

Nope, that's above ground. I'll try and find the thing I'm talking about tomorrow.
EDIT: Woops, Thanks Xei!

Also the other thing I forgot while I was reading everyone else's posts is the Fibonacci Sequence.
Simply beautiful; as it relates to nature as well as fractals.

Okay my reason for staying up a bit more is to drink Chamomile tea so that I can sleep. hehe

Originally Posted by Xei

Nope, it's literally just a disk of metal.

Hm, why's it so special?

Originally Posted by Xei

Yes, I find anthropology, human history, and the history of life extremely interesting. Here's a ridiculously amazing visualisation of the concept you're referring to:

Evolution Timeline - AndaBien - StumbleUpon

Lots of people disagree with me but I find that to be something that requires explanation. It is no doubt that intelligence experienced a paradigm shift with the emergence of homo sapiens, but why was it such a minuscule period of time ago, geologically?

Thanks for the link.
Well, our closer ancestors were also fairly intelligent. So it wasn't a HUGE shift.
This is just my opinion, and I am by no means educated enough to have any say in the matter -
But I think that the biggest advantage that we have and had over other species is our language capability.

Maybe a small increase in intelligence. But honestly I don't think it was that huge.
The only way to prove this though, would be to go back in time or clone one of our close ancestors.
Alternatively we could give existing animals, through genetic manipulation, a better ability for language and give them arms and hands like ours.
Dolphins and monkeys would be good candidates.

I love ferrofluids

Originally Posted by tommo

Well, our closer ancestors were also fairly intelligent. So it wasn't a HUGE shift.

Well, that's debatable (the idea of behavioural modernity, which is thought to have started around 50,000 years ago and explains the sudden emergence of art and culture, is not set in stone), but still, even if we include them; homo still makes up a very tiny period of world history, and I don't think it's debatable that there is something extraordinarily different about homo.

Hm, why's it so special?

Just because of the amazingly long time it can spin for. They did the equations and worked out the optimal shape.

Originally Posted by Spartiate

Aristotle was pretty much wrong about everything.

I wish philosopher hadn't been banned, his response to this would have been so funny.

I find the idea of farming amoeba incredible. It's just one of the examples of social traits among microbes found in the last decade.

Originally Posted by Xei

Thanks DuB, I'll read that. I've been meaning to read Dawkins for a while; in particular I'd like to know about evolution in a bit more depth, but I don't know how objective, relevant, or how far beyond layman's stuff Dawkins is..?

Judging by your posts, you have a pretty good grasp on everything Dawkins talks about in his books, so it would probably be a waste of time for you. He's good at popularizing ideas about natural selection, and reading his books is a good way to learn about basic concepts. At the same time, I think his books are misleading and really bad for developing proper intuition about evolution.

Since you're mathematically minded, I suggest you take a good book on population genetics. It will probably teach you more about evolution than dozens of courses from a typical (molecular) biology curriculum.

Originally Posted by Xei

Aristotle's approach to knowledge set humans back a thousand years or so. It was only by attacking scholasticism, largely based on Aristotle's ideas, that the modern world came to be. The insistence that all knowledge is syllogistic is, firstly, extremely restrictive of the types of knowledge we can have, and, secondly, doesn't even give us correct knowledge (viz: the fire element has an inherent tendency to rise. The sun is made of fire. Hence, the sun rises above the Earth. The mistake of course being that there is absolutely no basis for the initial assertion that matter is made of four elements). Before the enlightenment, academia basically meant sitting around and making these absolutely trivial and worthless kinds of arguments. And one of Aristotle's four causes in particular was totally backward (namely that inanimate matter does what it does because it wants to achieve a goal).

I'm quite sure that humanity would have managed to hold itself back just fine if Aristotle had never been.

As others have pointed out and I acknowledge, Aristotle was wrong in a lot of his particular arguments. Nearly everybody was. But he introduced us to the very notion that something like logic and argument could even be systematized and formalized. That's a pretty big deal. Later thinkers would refine his logical system, but they do so by building on the framework erected by Aristotle.

Aristotle's discussion of the four causes is important because it points out that there are multiple levels of explanation in terms of which to view any phenomenon. It was a rejection of greedy reductionism before greedy reductionism was even a fad: it is neither possible nor desirable to fully understand a phenomenon strictly at its lowest level. Modern cognitive science is built on this basic view of explanation, and evolutionary biology in particular routinely explains phenomena in terms of what Aristotle called their "final cause." It's not backward at all; it's a useful way of thinking.

You cant really blame Aristotle for how the Scholastic philosophers interpreted his work and unfortunately the general consensus for about a 500 years was "if your work contradicts Aristotle, you are wrong" which stifled philosophical progress until Copernicus. But on the other hand Aristotle practically invented logic, biology, zoology, physics, and the list goes on and on. I think these contributions outweigh the negativity attributed to him because of St. Augustine and Aquinas.

With regards to the OP, I think the complex interrelationships between all life on earth and the universe fills me with awe. Also the fact that I will be alive when our species is exploring the cosmos around us makes me thankful to be born when I was.

Originally Posted by DuB

I'm quite sure that humanity would have managed to hold itself back just fine if Aristotle had never been.

As others have pointed out and I acknowledge, Aristotle was wrong in a lot of his particular arguments. Nearly everybody was. But he introduced us to the very notion that something like logic and argument could even be systematized and formalized. That's a pretty big deal. Later thinkers would refine his logical system, but they do so by building on the framework erected by Aristotle.

I don't know enough history to know how true that is, but I'll take your word. All I'd say though is that, yes, the question is an excellent one to have been raised, but Aristotle's specific answer was very misguided, poorly self-analysed, and probably caused a great deal of regress.

Aristotle's discussion of the four causes is important because it points out that there are multiple levels of explanation in terms of which to view any phenomenon. It was a rejection of greedy reductionism before greedy reductionism was even a fad: it is neither possible nor desirable to fully understand a phenomenon strictly at its lowest level. Modern cognitive science is built on this basic view of explanation, and evolutionary biology in particular routinely explains phenomena in terms of what Aristotle called their "final cause." It's not backward at all; it's a useful way of thinking.

I can't think of any argument that is truly an a priori argument for something based on a final cause. As far as I can tell, nowadays such arguments have been universally rejected and replaced with a demand for explanations that are, on some subconscious level at the very least, non-teleological. Some of the great achievements of science, such as the theory of natural selection (as opposed to "animals evolve because by their nature they want to survive"), or the molecular biological explanation of life, have eliminated such arguments through reductionism. Can you give a more solid example?

Teleological explanations are alive and well in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and I would speculate (but do not really know) much of the social sciences. The thing that we want to avoid is not the exercise of coming up with teleological explanations--what we want to avoid is the temptation of simply leaving it at that, that is, considering those the only type of explanation needed. Explanations in terms of function are useful, but they require supplementation with explanations from lower, more concrete levels.

You can get a pretty long way in making sense of many evolutionary changes by assuming that genes are in some sense "selfish" and want to propagate themselves, or that species are in some sense striving toward self-preservation, and then reasoning through what would empirically follow from this. Obviously this does not represent a complete explanation for the phenomena in question -- a more complete explanation requires appeals to the relevant molecular biology and to concepts of probability, among other things -- but it is nonetheless a useful heuristic device for coming to grips with a phenomenon and deriving novel hypotheses. I suspect that this sort of thinking is what SnakeCharmer was referring to when he warned that Dawkins promotes poor intuitions about evolution; that is, that Dawkins promotes thinking of genes as decision making agents. IMO, such a claim about genes would be so obviously far fetched that I have a hard time believing that any person could seriously be in danger of thinking of it literally true. But hey, people surprise me all the time, and admittedly there have been some rather odd book reviews attacking the idea of a "selfish gene."

This general mode of thinking also frequently arises in cognitive science, particularly in studies of decision making. For example, there are many, many demonstrations of people neglecting some of the relevant information when making various judgments. The question arises: Why? Given that the relevant information is available to people, that they know how to use the information, and that the quality of their judgment would usually be better off (or at least not worse off) if they used it, why do they often neglect to? A popular teleologically-flavored explanation that arose in the 1970s-80s is that people are "cognitive misers" of sorts who are loathe to spend their finite cognitive resources unless it is really necessary. They are willing to sacrifice judgmental accuracy in many situations in order to reduce mental effort. This leads to at least two general hypotheses: that you can "push around" the number and nature of biases that people show by manipulating task characteristics such as the ease of availability of relevant information and various incentives for accuracy, and that if you lead people to err toward accuracy and thus "spend" more cognitive resources, they will show cognitive impairment in a subsequent task. These have generally been borne out by the data (although the full story is obviously a bit more complicated than that). So there is heuristic value in the functional explanation that cognitive biases are "for" preserving cognitive resources, despite that it is not literally true that people are stingy hoarders of some mental tender. A more complete explanation then involves identifying the biological/neural correlates of these apparent "cognitive resources" and characterizing them.

The general theme here is that it is desirable to understand complicated phenomena on multiple levels, with none being especially privileged, one of which being the functional level, i.e., what is it for? In cognitive science this idea has been famously expounded by David Marr in a 1982 essay, but it's noteworthy that Aristotle said pretty much the same thing more than 2000 years earlier.