Questioning Scientific Titans
June 25, 2016 at 2:23 pm
(This post was last modified: June 25, 2016 at 2:25 pm by ScepticOrganism.)
Hey everyone,
So I was discussing with my gf today Archimedes's famous term "Eureka!", and how it came to be. I told her that he basically came up with a way to make it so that large heavy ships don't drown.
At a certain point she said that there is this flaw, and that flaw in that theory, and "wouldn't it be easier to do this and that?". At which point I became "triggered", I started acting like a bible thumping Christian saying "how dare you question Archimedes!!"
I also told her that "we're bent to the bias of the vintage point of our own history, so you can't really act like you would have figured it out in his time". And that she needed to have deep scientific knowledge about many scientific disciplines in order to properly gauge, or even say that there were "flaws" with his theory.
And to her credit, she admitted that the word flaw might not have been the most appropriate term. She's also quite the mathematician, she's even the top student in our uni. At any rate, I felt bad afterwards, because I felt like I was some kind of "extremest".
I guess my point is, or rather my question is; at which point do we become allowed to freely flaunt terms like "flaw" and whatnot at scientists and even some theories?
So I was discussing with my gf today Archimedes's famous term "Eureka!", and how it came to be. I told her that he basically came up with a way to make it so that large heavy ships don't drown.
At a certain point she said that there is this flaw, and that flaw in that theory, and "wouldn't it be easier to do this and that?". At which point I became "triggered", I started acting like a bible thumping Christian saying "how dare you question Archimedes!!"
I also told her that "we're bent to the bias of the vintage point of our own history, so you can't really act like you would have figured it out in his time". And that she needed to have deep scientific knowledge about many scientific disciplines in order to properly gauge, or even say that there were "flaws" with his theory.
And to her credit, she admitted that the word flaw might not have been the most appropriate term. She's also quite the mathematician, she's even the top student in our uni. At any rate, I felt bad afterwards, because I felt like I was some kind of "extremest".
I guess my point is, or rather my question is; at which point do we become allowed to freely flaunt terms like "flaw" and whatnot at scientists and even some theories?
"organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority" -- Richard Dawkins
