Thoughts on Buddhism

[Abracadabra]

Look man, unless you have a degree in Quantum Mechanics then stop making shit up. Suggesting that scientists make shit up all the time...well...what little respect I might have had for you is completely lost now.

I grow tired of your lies and your ignorance.

I'm sorry that you are perceiving our conversations in such a negative light.

That was certainly never my intent.

Its obvious that you have ZERO idea of what science is about. You build up a strawman of "Scientists make shit up" and then use it to excuse the fact that you are making shit up and to also make it seem as if your made up spirit bullshit is "just as scientific" as Quantum mechanics.

You are horribly ignorant to the scientific method.

The scientific method is extremely simple and straight forward.

First you create a hypothesis. It doesn't matter how you come up with it. You could make one up entirely on whimsical fantasy. The origin of your hypothesis is totally irrelevant to the scientific method.

All that the is required for the scientific method is that your hypothesis can be tested via observations and/or experiment in a way that is consistent and repeatable so that other scientists can test it independently as well.

Once your hypothesis has been tested, you can then either dismiss it as being wrong (i.e. it failed the test of its own predictions), or you can demonstrate that it is correct (i.e. the predictions it makes can be verified to be true)

And that's all there is to the scientific method.

And scientist most certainly do "make up shit" and test it. In most cases the shit they make up fails to pan out. That's not a problem. At least they rule something out when they do that and they learn something.

For example, the Higgs field is "made up shit". And now they are testing that hypothesis to see if it pans out. If they find evidence for the Higgs field they will all rejoice. If they don't find it, they will probably find something else, and then they will rejoice that they found something NEW and soon everyone will completely forget about the made up shit about a "Higgs field".

It's going to have to go one way or the other. They'll either find it or stumble across something else whilst their are searching for it.

Same thing goes for strings, and supersymmetry, etc.

I know exactly how science works. It's no mystery.

In the case of the Higgs field they'll probably find it. I don't think Dr. Higgs just made his hypothesis up on a pure whim. He most likely has pretty solid reasons for believing that this field actually exists.

I'm not claiming that all scientists are pulling their hypotheses out of a rabbit's hat. But clearly some of them are.

Leonards Susskind's original recognition that quarks can act like strings or rubber bands was a hypothesis that was born out of mathematical insight as he was studying the mathematical descriptions of quarks.

But some of the more esoteric "Brane Theory" or "M-Theory" that has evolved from that original insight does indeed reek of people just making up whimsical things out of thin air. In fact, they basically confess that this is indeed what they are doing. They are grasping at purely abstract mathematical ideas to see what they can come up with out of pure imagination and unbounded mathematics (mathematics not restrained by rational limitations such as 3-D space, etc.)

If their mathematics needs 11 dimensions then no problem, they demand that nature must have 11 dimensions in order to fit their esoteric whimsical theories.

If you don't believe that this is what they do then you are the one who doesn't understand what scientists have been up to lately.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Edited because of a bad quote tag. The message wasn't showing up at all.