Strange

I suspect biology was a lot more accurate than that. Posting images instead of text makes discussion very difficult but, I will try: "The sun and moon move" Everyone thought this. For most of human history. They could see the Sun and Moon moving across the sky. There is no insight here from your book. Someone has clumsily retro-fitted modern science (that the Sun moves through the galaxy) to try and make those words fit. But those words just describe what everyone thought at the time. And you were being shown that it is wrong in some details. You posted a picture of a flower, not an atom. So none of this makes any sense. That has nothing to do with science.

Nope. Just making old vague stories fit with what we currently understand. Someone could have said the same 100 years ago, and their claims would now be wrong because science has moved on. Changing the interpretation of the stories to fit current understanding does not prove they contain some eternal truth. Quite the opposite in fact. Edit: sorry. Just saw the mod note (cross-posted).

Well, there was the Lamarckian theory, which was scientific because it was falsifiable by looking at the evidence. And, in the end, it was falsified. I am not aware of any others. Well, any scientific theory can, in principle, be proven wrong. That is the nature of science. But it would be very surprising for a theory with such an overwhelming weight of evidence to be found wrong. (Actually, very few theories are ever proved wrong. I can only think of phlogiston, and the steady state universe.) Note that evolution by natural selection relies on three things: 1. There is diversity in a population. This is an observed fact. 2. These differences are inheritable. Also an observed fact. 3. That the differences result in different reproductive success. Also an observed fact. As such, it is hard to imagine how natural selection could not work as it does.

Yes, I guess it depends what one means by "junk" food. I am thinking of things like McDonalds and similar fast food outlets. I don't see how anyone could describe these as delicious. Inedible would be closer, to my mind. (I did take a bite from a McDonalds burger when they opened their first restaurant in London. I threw the rest away and have never been in one again!) So, my definition of junk food is stuff that tastes disgusting but a lot of people eat anyway!

There is no such thing.

If the theory is wrong (and it almost certainly is) then the device will do nothing. A few vague drawings on an anonymous twitter account aren't really enough to judge anything. But if someone had actually come up with new physics or a valuable new technology then they would be either publishing it in science journals or talking to investors to start a hugely successful company. So, yes, it is nonsense.

Presumably he saw it on a Creationist website and just believed it because he doesn't know any better. (Ironic for someone who has frequently raged against the idea of god.)

The furthest / earliest we can ever see is 380,000 years after the big bang. Before that the universe was opaque. As far as we know, there is no edge to the universe. I have reported your hijack of this thread with your misunderstandings of cosmology. You should have started your own thread for this. There are galaxies within our observable universe that are receding at more than c. We can see galaxies that are receding at more than c. Yes we have. The CMB is the furthest it is ever possible to see. Nonsense. Philosophy cannot say anything realistic about the future state of the universe (except by echoing the results of science).

I don't believe she is awesome. I don't believe her promises. But I'm quite sure she, like everyone else, is capable of judges others. (Which is a bit sad.) But, compared to the jealous and vindictive god of the OT, I think I will come out OK.

I kind of agree. It would be Romanization if the readers of the transcribed name knew the phonemics of the source language and the rules for transcribing it. For example, there is a shop (chain) in Japan called Meidi-ya; the "gone native" ex-pats know that it is called Meiji-ya while visitors and those ex-pats who spend all their time at the American Club (or equivalent) pronounce it as it is spelled - i.e. an Anglicised rather than Romanised version (ditto the district called Hiroo and the Hot CoRocket club).

If the symptoms persist for more than 80 days, seek professional help.

It is not really about one model being "superior" to another (however you are defining that). It is more that the mental models you are describing, that we all create as a way of navigating the world, are informal, fuzzy and changeable from moment to moment. They can, however, for the basis for formalised and testable models. The latter become the basis of science. So the only way that science is "superior" is that it is a methodology that is formalised, rigorous and tested. None of which applies to our mental models.

I think you are correct. But part of the humour (to my mind) comes from the verbosity of the question and the succinctness of the answer. p.s. I suggest googling "linguistic llama"; there are plenty more terrible linguistics jokes ...

Probably Denso tape. Available from all good plumbing suppliers. http://www.denso.net/densotape/ Brilliant and totally disgusting to work with! Make sure you have plenty of Swarfega to hand. (I think that will help you clear up - I ended up using white spirit to wash my hands - not a great idea!)

You haven't said anything new (yet). Yes, you can (of course) transcribe the words differently by spelling/representing the word "cow" with the symbol "1" and the word car with the symbol 39. But I don't know what you hope to acheive with this. You say this as if it were a new or surprising insight. (Or is there another reason for the exclamation mark?) Not sure why you feel it is necessary to have a representation for the spaces. These rarely (if ever) have any semantic content even in written language. (Outside of computer programming.) So representing / listing the words (representations) and the concepts they refer to is only a small part of the problem of language. I have already mentioned that this ignores grammar. So, as you say, you still need to understand the language in order to make use of the list of indices. (This is getting into the problems with Searle's "Chinese Room" argument.) So perhaps you could go a bit further in explaining the purpose / benefit of convert words to indices? The other problem is that both these sentences contain anaphoric references. Understanding what is referred to by pronouns such as "this" is a big problem in linguistics and automatic speech recognition. It depends a lot on (possibly unspoken) context and previous utterances.

Well, not surprisingly, his answer is waaaay better than my attempt. (But it is what I was trying to get at )

A lot of people seem to be confused by this. Oversimplified explanation follows ... The Higgs field / mechanism (with its associated particle, the Higgs boson) gives particles mass (or, at least, some particles some of their mass!) but that does not give them gravity. The space-time field is what causes things with mass (or energy) to have gravity, and the particle associate with that field would be the graviton (if it exists). So, in short, the Higgs gives things mass, and the graviton means that mass causes gravity. Simples.

That was exactly what I thought of when I read that story!

Don't thank me until someone who knows what they are talking about answers!

Or, perhaps, as quantizations of the excitations of the field (which would be caused by the presence of mass-energy.

That's a good question. (And a good reply from swansont.)

Like all bosons, when it acts as a mediator of the force then it is a virtual particle. You could also have a "real" graviton (which is probably unstable and very short-lived). I assume the guys at the LHC are looking for signals that could be a graviton. But as we don't know what mass it might have, we don't know if it is feasible to find it (if it exists). I don't think that question means anything. Virtual particles don't, as far as I know, have a size. And "real" particles have (or are modelled as) zero size. (The fundamental ones, anyway.) Again, not sure if that make much sense. However, because gravitons are bosons (not fermions) any number of them can occupy the same space. Fields extend through all of space. And, arguably, so do particles until they are localised by interacting with something.

The problem is that these difficulties arise when you have a combination of very high mass (therefore gravity is relevant) and very tiny dimensions (therefore, presumably, quantum behaviour is important). Examples, such as the mass of a star compressed to "something" at the centre of a black hole. Or the early universe, where the entire mass of the observable universe appears to have been compressed to less than the size of an atom. Possibly, a quantum-gravity theory will explain these better (and maybe explain why things were not as intensely compressed as a simple application of GR alone suggests. For example, one recent attempt to approximate this suggests that the universe could be infinitely old: https://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html

If it is mediated by virtual particles, then that (virtual) particle would be the graviton. And, as far as I know, the field would still be space-time.

What does that sound like? And how do you know that is what it was?