Strange

It is this sort of hopelessly naive attitude that allowed the exit campaign to win. Do you really think that the regulations on automotive safety, for example, can be reduced to one page? Only if you abandon safety as a goal. And if those safety regulations are not mandatory, then people will not implement them (because it is expensive) and we will see a massive rise in death on the roads. All to save a bit of red-tape. Well done. Sounds like you will need a massive increase in immigration to support that. Probably not what the leave campaign was aiming for.

Exactly. Even if one thinks there is some sort of different reality behind that (or none, in the case of solipsism) it makes no difference. All we have is the measurements.

Yep, both Trump and the exit vote seem to be driven by vacuous promises that "it will all be better (just don't ask how ... and ignore the experts)"

Ditto. But ... Because the putative soul has nothing to do with evolution. Sure. Start your own religion. (And get rich.) Because that is what people believe. (Which is why science is irrelevant.) Agreed.

As noted, kinetic energy is not a force. In addition, no energy or force is required for an object to move through space at constant velocity.

Because (I assume) divine intervention is the only explanation that makes sense (in a religious context) and arguments about evolution are therefore totally irrelevant. Simply repeating the same thing doesn't make it any more relevant.

Could be worse. Maybe Farage will decide to join the Conservative party and run for leader.

I wonder who they will blame when they see the economy going into recession, when immigration doesn't decrease (although, I suppose increasing unemployment might be one way of reducing the number of foreign workers), when we have the same number of regulations and laws that have to be compatible with Europe, when we are no more able to avoid non-tarrif barriers with the USA and China than Europe has been, etc. I'm sure they won't blame themselves ....

Thanks for this, BTW.

Exactly. You can't avoid it. It is a philosophical question. Do you have any evidence that scientists are misled by such things? Not really. Measurements are measurements. Whether made by something we are familiar with (rulers and clocks) or more sensitive instruments that seem to reveal obscure counter-intuitive results.

There is no scientific sense in which we are "more advanced". Well, OK we are more advanced in some ways but every other organism is more advanced in other ways. Thank you. (I already know why [some] atheists create this conflict, because they are very vocal about it - as this thread shows.)

Almost certainly. It is well documented that memories are modified by later events. No. It is absolutely normal - both the modification of memories to fit experience and the "fooling yourself" through various cognitive biases. The latter is one of the main reasons for the scientific method working as it does.

I have heard a lot of incoherent and contradictory nonsense from them ever since Farage crawled out of a hole somewhere. At least this might see then end of him and UKIP.

That is actually exactly what I was [trying] to say! OK, in Markus's analogy, the numbers are the reality that is mapped by GR. But the numbers aren't "reality", they are just what we are able measure with our instruments. (But that is probably getting further into the philosophy than we need to!)

Excellent post, Markus. However, there is a difference. In the case of landscape and maps, we can look at both and compare them. But in the case of GR, we only have the map. We know nothing else about "reality" (we don't even know if it exists!)

A "leave" politician just said that the PM should not rush to invoke Article 50 because "that could result in the UK being excluded from all sorts of decisions." WTF. The leave people WANT to be excluded from decisions in Europe.

People believe all sorts of things. So what? We should accept ideas just because people believe them? Have you missed the fact that this is a science forum?

So you have a vague memory of something you might have dreamt that might bear a vague resemblance to something that happens in real life. This is not seeing the future. There are a number of well known cognitive biases at play here. For example, you are not counting the number of dreams you have that don't ever "come true". You are not accurately comparing what you dreamt to what happens. You are making you vague memories fit with experience. You can easily show this to be the case by writing down your dreams and then checking which ones later accurately match reality.

But the whole point of the leave campaign is that the British parliament should make our laws. Therefore parliament should vote on what to do. Referendums are a good demonstration of the flaws of democracy. And this one has no legal status as a decision. It is up to the democratically elected representatives to decide (the country is a representative democracy, after all).

Statistical probability. But it would be fantastic if he could show that I was wrong.

Everest is about as tall as a mountain can be on Earth (and even then it is temporary): http://mentalfloss.com/uk/geography/28668/how-tall-can-a-mountain-actually-be https://www.quora.com/How-tall-can-a-mountain-become-on-Earth And here are some rough calculations to support that: https://talkingphysics.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/how-high-can-mountains-be/

Black holes and the expansion of space are both consequences or predictions of general relativity, the theory that models the curvature of space-time. Apart from that, there isn't any real connection between them. Space-time isn't made of "stuff" so it doesn't need to be created. All the "expansion of space" means is that, in the absence of any other forces, things will tend to get further apart. So the only thing that is being "created" is distance.

How? Like tree rings or something?

Would I ... ? I did look at the document. The argument appears to be: if we do something different from Cantor's diagonal argument it doesn't result in a contradiction, therefore the diagonal argument is flawed.

Like all his other attempts, it is trivially wrong anyway.