I want to first assure you all that I am not ignoring your comments on my blogs! Since I am new to the HuffPost team, we have to work out a few technical kinks before I can engage in direct conversation with you. In the meantime, I think it's a good idea to get an old thorn that's been infecting most of our sides out of the way.
You do not have a theory! You have an idea. A theory is not something that one person can so arrogantly possess. I don't think I truly understood this concept until graduate school. When I was working on my undergraduate degree, I was fortunate enough to find a path that combined psychology, philosophy, and biology as my main areas of study. One would think that taking classes like the Philosophy of Natural Science would address some of these issues, but instead we spent weeks discussing why Lamarck should be given equal space in the evolution dialogue with Darwin (yes, my professor was quackers. But, he also taught Thomas Kuhn, an invaluable experience for me). Anyway, it took working with some very inspirational people and reading some game-changing literature for me to finally understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. In my nervousness defending my Master's thesis I uttered the phrase, "my theory is..." Needless to say, I was quickly corrected by about fifteen different people.
When most of us were kids, learning about the scientific method for the first time, we were taught that a hypothesis is an educated guess. Although this is an oversimplification, it is graspable for most young children. It is also, I'd venture to guess, what most adults would currently say if they were asked to define the term. Hypothesis formation is born out of observation. Currently, the top three Google searches for "What would happen if..." are 1) "...a girl took viagra?" 2) "...the earth stopped spinning?" and 3) "...I ate myself?" This means that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Googlers are engaging in the beginning stages of scientific exploration. But it's not enough to ask "what would happen if I ate myself?" A hypothesis requires supposition based on observation. "If I ate myself, then I would double in strength" is a hypothesis, albeit one that is likely to be refuted.
But say enough martyrs for the scientific cause (or for the right amount of money) were willing to remove and subsequently devour their own ____fill in the blank____. And say that consistently, these poor saps actually did develop significant increases in strength. With enough repeated trials and enough consistent evidence, scientists from around the globe would start to see patterns emerging. New experiments would be devised to account for variables that may have confabulated early results. Details would be explored and hammered out. Eventually, a theory would be born.
Scientists are, by nature, conservative in our language. This is because we have been wrong a fair share of times, not because we suck at our jobs, but because we must make assumptions based on available evidence using only available technology. We are uncomfortable with words like proven, fact, and always/never. We prefer to say that "recent evidence supports the claim..." or "it is highly likely that...." Theory is the closest thing we have to fact within the scientific community. Theories emerge after mountains of evidence have been collected in support of a claim. Theories hold water until repeatable evidence comes along to disprove its individual components (we are happy to disprove until the cows come home, but proof is left to the mathematicians). So the next time somebody starts an argument saying, "Evolution is just a theory," before you roll your eyes and storm out of the room, you can always come back with, "Yeah, evolution is a theory. So is gravity. Let's argue about the merits of that one." #facepalm
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I have to ask, because your account of the history smacks of revisionism. By NO means has it long been the theory/belief/whatever you want to call it that scientists "disprove until the cows come home" nor that "proof is left to the mathematicians".
On the contrary: I did a search on Google not too long ago to find that a scientific journal of the 50s was still talking about experiments 'proving' General Relativity.
Mind you, this was not a popular journal, it was not an article written by a science writer for a popular newspaper, it was a science journal. Genuine scientists really did talk about "proving theories".
In fact, if you look up "logical positivism" in Wikipedia or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you will find that embarrassed by their error Logical Positivists had to make a CHANGE in their statements of the "philosophy of science": they had to substitute 'falsification/falsifiable' for the "verification principle".
But to hear may self-styled scientists talk about it now, you would think that all scientists have always practiced science exactly as Popper says it should be done, by choosing falsifiable hypotheses and testing them, never proving, only falsifying (disproving).
This IS revisionism. It is certainly not the way Newton worked. I would have to look skeptically at anyone who claims that Einstein worked that way.
Welcome, Ms.Santa Maria. Thanks for the fun start to your new HP post.
The theory goes something like this: "A human fetus is not a human being. A human newborn is. At some point in that development, as the organism grows older and larger, the organism becomes a human being."
Also, have you ever actually encountered somebody who claimed that "It's just a theory that a fetus is a human being?" Or mentioned a "theory" of humanity to debate? There is a whole article you (presumably) just read about how this a sloppy and incorrect way to argue.
"#facepalm"
I have to go for the #headdesk. When I was in school, Lamarck was presented as: "If a woman chops off her left arm, then her children will be born sans left arm."
As it turns out, Lamarck is given more than his fair share in his Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
"Interest in Lamarckism has recently increased, as several studies in the field of epigenetics have highlighted the possible inheritance of behavioral traits acquired by the previous generation. A recent such study examined foraging behavior in chickens as a function of stress, concluding:
Our findings suggest that unpredictable food access caused seemingly adaptive responses in feeding behavior, which may have been transmitted to the offspring by means of epigenetic mechanisms, including regulation of immune genes. This may have prepared the offspring for coping with an unpredictable environment.... Transmissions of information across generations which does not involve traditional inheritance of DNA-sequence alleles is often referred to as soft inheritance or 'Lamarckian inheritance'.
The evolution of acquired characteristics has also been shown in human populations who have experienced starvation, resulting in altered gene function in both the starved population and their offspring."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(science)
"The term phenomenology in science is used to describe a body of knowledge that relates empirical observations of phenomena to each other, in a way that is consistent with fundamental theory, but is not directly derived from theory."
Well, it is after all the 'theory' of relativity, so if something happens to violate it, that something is not of necessity false on its face, a fact that I've had to reiterate a tiring number of times. As it turns out, the 'faster than light' particle might actually be explained by relativity - specifically the relative motion of the receiver and the transmitter and the potential timing error it introduced.
But nonetheless, the point is an excellent one. Absolutes are very hard to come by. I figure when I know absolutely everything in the universe, then I'll be able to state a few absolutes. I can state with a certain degree of confidence that I absolutely will not live long enough to know that much - but that's just an idea.
It's the trip, though, that matters. The voyage is the adventure, not the arrival.
Watching that CERN thing and the discovery of the Earth size planet is pure fun. Fun seems to be missing when people argue science especially if they go after science vs. religion where armies of people think scientists work hard all day long to disprove the Bible.
Words like, model, mechanism, process, cause, effect, theory, consistent, inconsistent, observation, are more common for scientists to use to describe what they think is happening in the real world.
In working scientists' language, the true dichotomy, as such, is between Theory and Experiment.
Also, it's just a "theory", but I believe that scientists who reference "game-changing literature" that supposedly proves they know what they're talking about generally provide citations to that literature. Just a theory.
A major religion is based in part on the term virgin,,, yet at that point in time it only meant a very young girl.
Science then must define terms exactly, while the study of myths does not require such strict defintions.
Regards
No, you are completely wrong about the term 'virgin'. And you are completely wrong about its role in the religion that believes that a virgin gave birth.
It is not true that the word then "only meant a very young girl". On the contrary: the original Hebrew word is ambiguous, but the Greek translation of it was not: it clearly meant 'virgin', just like the English word. Yet for some reason lost to history, the Jewish translators of Isaiah 7:14 used this word instead of the Greek equivalent for "young girl".
Here is an excerpt from my work:
"A theory is a supposition, a system of ideas, or a model that sets to explain something that has remained intractable to other approaches. Theories are usually composed of general principles that are independent of the phenomenon or phenomena being explicated. These principles are self-evidently true and are definitionally broad.
The word theory is derived from the ancient Greek word theoria, meaning "contemplation, speculation, a looking at." Theory is thus a subjective view of how things are experienced by the mind and senses. Unnoticed or unmentioned by the modern scientist and philosopher is that the word theory contains the prefix theo-, meaning “God.” In Eastern Orthodox theology, theoria is a stage of personal illumination, achieved only by the most dispassionate and pure of heart: the “vision” of God. This enlightenment thus lays the path to theosis, meaning “the attainment of likeness to or union with God.” In this regard, theosis is the final stage of personal transformation and the ultimate goal of Christianity and other religions. It may shock the reader to know this, but the purpose of the ultimate theory of the Universe is to provide a first-person perspective of being God."
"a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena"
"an ideal or hypothetical set of facts, principles, or circumstances"
Theoretician I was rather struck by your "It may shock the reader to know this, but the purpose of the ultimate theory of the Universe is to provide a first-person perspective of being God." Is that your idea or someone else's? I'd like to know more about it. Because I too have a theory and it's one about consciousness which fits it well, see http://light.simanonok.com
Once you have the facts they go into the bag of theory, that holds all the facts together.
Now add ideology, constructs of reality based on semantics and linguistic models. These supposedly express the theories in others' minds. As humans we go on to create meta constructs and validate them using language as a medium to test/discuss individual constructs.
One such ideology is empirical science that uses the term theory in a socially constructed authoritarian system (more democratic than others but largely controlled by editors of "peers" that happen to have biases of their own peer selected ideological theory). Hence, scientist get mad at non-scientist using the term theory in ways that scientist want to use the word theory.
When even the speed of light may not be a limit, physics is relative to social constructs, and semantic arguments are simply expressions of the arrogance of one's own ideological priesthood.
hariaum
For example, when Richard Boyle observed the phenomena relating pressure and volume, he confirmed that this was always true and described it by the equation pV=k. He had not explanation at the time for why this was true, so it became known as Boyle's Law. Once the Theory of Thermodynamics provided a framework explaining this phenomena, Boyle's Laws was incorporated into the Theory.
In fact, one of the effects of the Theory of Relativity is that Newton's Laws of Motion are not in fact all correct, they are just a very good approximation at relative speeds much less then light.
http://womenshistory.about.com/b/2004/04/23/was-einsteins-wife-his-silent-collaborator.htm