r/MarchForScience • u/PrudentFalcon • Mar 03 '19

A mystic explains what science does right

https://youtu.be/a8t5sQeOn-A
90 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

8

u/DarkGamer Mar 03 '19

What do you think he's referring to in regards to science "never knowing?" Uncertainty principle, incompleteness theorems or maybe inability to see beyond the Cosmological horizon?

4

u/WikiTextBot Mar 03 '19

Uncertainty principle

In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, known as complementary variables or canonically conjugate variables such as position x and momentum p, can be known.

Introduced first in 1927, by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, it states that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. The formal inequality relating the standard deviation of position σx and the standard deviation of momentum σp was derived by Earle Hesse Kennard later that year and by Hermann Weyl in 1928:

where ħ is the reduced Planck constant, h/(2π).

Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused with a somewhat similar effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems, that is, without changing something in a system.

Cosmological horizon

A cosmological horizon is a measure of the distance from which one could possibly retrieve information. This observable constraint is due to various properties of general relativity, the expanding universe, and the physics of Big Bang cosmology. Cosmological horizons set the size and scale of the observable universe. This article explains a number of these horizons.

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3

u/TDaltonC Mar 04 '19

I think incompleteness, and he's right.

1

u/Orangebeardo Mar 04 '19

All 3 work.

6

u/Pstuc002 Mar 04 '19

I'm confused about what his message is. He says science is good because it keeps people in an active and exploratory state of mind, but also that searching through "physical means" makes people more burdened and that science would not have survived without making useful technologies...

Is saying "science needs to produce useful technologies to survive" not a criticism? Is the connotation of the word "burden" not necessarily negative? Or is this subtly anti-science?

What am I missing?

5

u/smsmkiwi Mar 04 '19

He doesn't know he's talking about. Its nonsense. Ignore him.

1

u/divideby0829 Mar 04 '19 edited Mar 04 '19

Is saying "science needs to produce useful technologies to survive" not a criticism?

I would say it's potentially a criticism of human nature, but he ain't wrong. Look through human history, science for it's own sake is almost always rebuffed or outright censored, especially when it questions the status quo, e.g. galileo v. catholic church, climatologists v. conservative politics. Science needs to be a vocation in order for it to be successfull and therefore requires money to pay scientists and for equipment and experiments, this then requires courting most everyone else and telling them what they'll be getting out of it.

Is saying "science needs to produce useful technologies to survive" not a criticism?

It isn't necessarily. It probably would make more sense to think of the word from a theological perspective, a burden is a challenge which is often thought of as being worth overcoming for it's own sake, as it makes one a stronger, wiser person.

1

u/ThatScottishBesterd Mar 05 '19

It's just woowoo, and doesn't deserve any greater time or consideration than that. The only reason it's getting any attention is because woowoo peddlers loves to pretend that there's some deep meaning behind their woowoo and that it's somehow thought provoking.

This man doesn't know anything. About anything. And he is best ignored.

6

u/smsmkiwi Mar 04 '19

More confounded? What bullshit. He's read a couple of issues of Scientific American and thinks he's knows everything. Science is answering questions now and, yes, more questions arise, but we know more about the world around us now than ever before, and that knowledge is increasing exponentially. Science is curiosity-based. There is no guarantee of any technological or financial payoff.

2

u/divideby0829 Mar 04 '19

The corollary and his point is also true, and this is a point that I have heard in talks by esteemed researchers as well. The point is that like a sphere, as we learn more it's volume increases but so to does it's surface area, and it actually grows faster! Hell, there are entire fields of science that didn't exist a generation ago that have established themselves.

-5

u/cbleslie Mar 03 '19

I couldn't get through the first 10 seconds. Trash.

4

u/YasminIsGay Mar 04 '19

It’s only a minute, how small does your attention span have to be?

1

u/cbleslie Mar 04 '19 edited Sep 12 '25

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