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No, that is what is called the 'naturalistic fallacy', also known as 'one cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is''. But your title is another question: "Does science provide a path to a meaningful life?". In a very basic sense, every person striving for something, whatever, leads a meaningful life. It could be even unethical. But leaving that aside, people derive their meaningful life from many things: successfully raising kids, getting rich or powerful, help other people, making beautiful woodworking (how do I get at this example? I wonder...), trying to improve on their moral stance, trying to understand the universe... Which is science. Personally I think science can lead in another way to meaningful life, not just because one finds it 'interesting' or for the usage of its results in technology. Understanding the universe and our place in it can be a spiritual experience. I even once heard something like that from a theology student: he found the essence of religion the realisation that we are just a dust corn in the universe. Of course I like the factual way, as science goes, much better than a theological 'understanding', based on fantasies or old mythologies. And last but not least (being very subjective now), I would plead for studying philosophy. Not freewheeling philosophy (that is fantasy not necessarily with gods or magic), but philosophy grounded as well in science as in our daily experience. The nice thing of philosophy is that it brings all together: it contains also the reflections on what facts, values, and a meaningful life are. So philosophy in this sense is the highest endeavor a human can do . So, I think this was my most subjective posting in this forum.

That’s fair. People can find meaning anywhere, but as a rule we look to science for clarity and accuracy more than purpose.

Saw an interesting comment on Bluesky - there are undoubtedly women respondents in every poll who will vote for Kamala but can’t say that to a pollster in front of their Trumpy husband.

Lamentable Lagrange Articles The Lagrange points are one of my interests. I am a little obsessed with the Earth Moon Lagrange 2 point. One of my pet peeves are wrong explanations of these five locations. So many articles and Youtube videos claim these are locations where gravitational forces cancel each other out. One of many examples is Fraser Cain's video What Are The Lagrange Points? Finding Stable Points In Space. From that video: People often sensibly ask about L2 and L3. At both these locations the central and orbiting body both pull the same direction. How do those cancel each other? Or at the L4 and L5 where the gravity vectors are 60º from each each other. The only place where the two massive bodies pull in opposite directions is L1. And even at that location gravity does not cancel out. At the Sun Earth L1 point the sun's pull is about 34 times that of earth's. So, nope, the opposing gravities do not cancel at that location. At the Earth Moon L1 the earths pull is about 2.6 times that of the Moon's. So, nope, gravity doesn't cancel out there either. It's a three man tug of war. Enter Voldemort. There are three men in this tug of war. At the Earth Moon L2 the Earth and Moon are pulling the same direction against a third man who, like Voldemort, shall not be named. At the Sun Earth L1 point the earth is helped by Voldemort who at that location in nearly as strong as the sun's gravity. At L4 and L5 Voldemort is pulling nearly opposite the central body's tug. But not directly away from the center of the central body. Rather away from the barycenter of the two massive bodies. So Voldemort exactly cancels the central body's gravity and the small sideways tug of the orbiting body. I've attached an illustration of the Pluto Charon system. Pluto and Pluto's gravity is purple. Charon and Charon's gravity I've colored orange. And Voldemort is colored blue. Voldemort is Centrifugal Force The unnamed contestant in this three man tug of war is Centrifugal Force. Just about everyone is familiar with centrifugal force. It's what you feel on a spinning carnival ride. Or in a car making a turn. Why do high school physics teachers refuse to mention centrifugal force? Is it a ruthless entity set on world domination? No. It is avoided because "centrifugal force" or "centrifugal acceleration" are misnomers. It is not truly an acceleration. Rather it is just inertia, the tendency to travel in a straight line. However in a rotating frame inertia feels like a force. And, indeed, it can be treated like an acceleration if you're in a rotating frame. The pseudo acceleration can be expressed as ω2 r. Where ω is angular velocity in radians over time. Clueless Pedantry. It is a good thing to distinguish between inertia and acceleration. In my opinion it is sufficient to preface the term with "pseudo" or "so called" and proceed to use this pseudo force or acceleration when examining rotating systems. It is commonly used by engineers and even physicists. Coriolis force is also commonly used even though it is not truly a force. Dealing with this by eliminating it from our lexicon will lead to confusion. As illustrated by the many Lagrange explainers that are completely incorrect.

Your welcome if your familiar with latex and using latex for your math expressions use \[ latex\*] for seperate line and \(latex\*) for inline just remove the * from the last bracket as I put them there to prevent activation. I figured you might like the paper as your example has excellent similarity to the example within the paper.

While it may be the object of religion to provide meaning in life, that is not the job of science. Trying to set science and religion up against one another, as if they are alternatives in some way, or even rivals, is to misunderstand science. Science is the study of nature to understand how it works. As others have pointed out, people can derive a sense of meaning and purpose in life from all manner of things they do, which give them a sense of achievement and fulfilment. Science can be one of them. Ethics is an entirely separate question. Immense damage was done, over a century ago, in the United States, by the ideas of somebody called Andrew Dixon White, the first president of Cornell in the late c.19th. He promoted the so-called "conflict thesis" which claims science and religion are inherently opposed to one another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis This is a rather discredited notion, belied, for example, by the number of clergymen and religious people who have played prominent roles in science. About the only serious example of conflict, historically, was the Galileo affair. This was largely a result of paranoia in the Catholic church about "heresies" at the time of the Reformation, combined with tactlessness on the part of Galileo. Dixon White's perspective was no doubt coloured by the upsurge of creationist, extreme Protestantism in N America at the time, which of course had huge problems with Charles Darwin's ideas, but that is hardly indicative of an intrinsic conflict between science and religion. Nevertheless the idea of conflict has taken root in some quarters and remains influential to this day.

I have a 1980's Canon F-44 Scientific Calculator that still works on the original batteries.

It does for scientists: doing research and making discoveries is what gives some people a meaningful way to contribute to society and also benefit from their work. Religion provides a meaningful occupation to clerics, monastics and theologians. For everybody else, the world is full of ways to be meaningful and productive. Many people find both their religion and scientific knowledge useful in navigating life. Some immerse themselves in art, or scholarship, or invention or sports or gardening or teaching or healing or saving endangered species, or.... whatever else people do. And of course, human relationships. No, but scientific information can direct them to appropriate action in the service of their values. The values themselves are constructed over time, on the from one's personality, environment, education, experience and social interactions.

Hi Prajna, to be honest I think you kind or needlessly torpedo'd the thread with this... "the denizens of such fora are a sarcastic, arrogant and unfriendly lot when it comes to examining such a device" up until you posted this the responses were actually quite nice interesting and helpful, in my opinion anyway. I also tried my best to help. Perhaps you were talking about your experiences on other forums. Also in another place you said something like "is a curious device and I'm curious and I can't understand why none of you are." Please don't be upset that people aren't interested in the device. It's just that its a very bold claim, far outside the realm of what people are familiar with --- it's like if you showed up to a running club and said you have a new technique that you can run 100m in 5 seconds... but no proof, you just wanna talk about it .... people's patience would be very short , until they see it, I don't it's fair to call it arrogance. personally i think it's a cool project, I don't think it will generate over unity energy, but it's neat anyway

He's said some stupid stuff that doesn't hold water.

I would also like to hear others' thoughts on whether or not science provides a path to living a meaningful life in the same vein as religion. I suppose that people can derive ethical values from scientific information, but others' thoughts on the matter is appreciated.

! Moderator Note Five pages on the subject seems sufficient, especially since we're now attracting those who have vested interests and want to avoid soapboxing. Thread closed.