I am going to resort to contrived measures to keep my threads alive and continue this interesting discussion, as some insecure bastards in the staff really decided to ban me merely because I was having fun with some stupid admin tag.
To all the ban hammers, prepare to be trolled very hard with sock accounts, as -unfortunately for you- I happen to have some free time this week. You're going to be punished severely for trying to silence people who don't agree with your worldview.
Again, not really. There are other possibilities like not correctly using the equipment, or unknowingly using damaged equipment, etc. So you need a lot more to prove non-existence. Generally speaking, it's not possible to prove negative assertions.
We don't necessarily need to observe things or detect them to prove they exist, you can have a purely deductive proof for the existence of something.
For example : the tallest tree in the world necessarily exists. Even if you never saw it nor knew anything about it, you're absolutely certain that it's real. The set of all trees out there is obviously finite, and since it's easy to make a one-to-one correspondance between each tree and the set of natural numbers, the set of all trees necessarily has a maximal element.
To all the ban hammers, prepare to be trolled very hard with sock accounts, as -unfortunately for you- I happen to have some free time this week. You're going to be punished severely for trying to silence people who don't agree with your worldview.
(November 16, 2022 at 10:06 am)polymath257 Wrote: If you had the correct equipment to detect an electron reliably and did not detect one, THEN you could reason that there is no electron.
Again, not really. There are other possibilities like not correctly using the equipment, or unknowingly using damaged equipment, etc. So you need a lot more to prove non-existence. Generally speaking, it's not possible to prove negative assertions.
(November 16, 2022 at 10:06 am)polymath257 Wrote: The plausible reasons for unicorns would all be based on some observations and the actual existence would not be demonstrated until the unicorns themselves were detected.
We don't necessarily need to observe things or detect them to prove they exist, you can have a purely deductive proof for the existence of something.
For example : the tallest tree in the world necessarily exists. Even if you never saw it nor knew anything about it, you're absolutely certain that it's real. The set of all trees out there is obviously finite, and since it's easy to make a one-to-one correspondance between each tree and the set of natural numbers, the set of all trees necessarily has a maximal element.
