Special Relativity. Lifetime.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Nah, mate.  Science is a methodology that uses measuring devices.  It's like saying if you drive, it means you're a car.

Boru

I'm clearly not talking about literal measuring devices. I'm not saying that science is a tape measure. And if I did I hope it would be clear that it was a metaphor.

The point was: that's what science does ... measure things. That's what the methodology is for. Sure, some people may say it's for finding the truth and stuff like that. Well, sure, that's fine, but you obviously can only find out truths that you're able to measure ... its function is measuring. And you can't know that you're actually measuring something beyond what you, and others like you, are perceiving. So it does not surprise me at all that observation sometimes appears to make subatomic particles behave differently. It could appear that way because we think we're looking at particles when really we're just looking at what looks like particles. It would be odd if observation didn't appear to affect reality when the only reality that we know is observation.

So, the point is that the knowledge is just knowledge of our own human sense-experience ... whether we extend it with tools or not ... because the tools themselves are also only known throughout our human sense-experience.

There could be advanced aliens out there who experience the world so differently that their scientific 'facts' completely contradict our scientific 'facts' and we couldn't say that theirs were wrong and ours are right.... or vice versa.  So the point is that even theoretical science is ultimately entirely empirical and we don't really know how reality is in itself.

What a lot of bollocks.

Boru