[Arm-netbook] Totally derailed topic

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 11:12 AM, Bill Kontos <vkontogpls at gmail.com> wrote:

> Nobody "believes" in science.

 sadly, they do.  they're usually the ones who tell you that the
climate's absolutely fine.

> The entire point of logically describing and
> explaining the world via the means of science is to get as close to "the
> truth" as you can. Accepting the results of scientists is unlike religion
> not a matter of absolute truth. It is a matter of realizing that for every
> given time the scientific answer accepted by the community is the closest
> one to "the truth" that we have. Understanding this is key to having a
> stable worldview while still being open-minded. The entire point of science
> is to constantly question the validity of your theories.

 ah.  i'm glad you qualified this finally in the last sentence.  the
prior paragraphs give the impression that there *is* some form of
"absolute certainty" that can be reached / experienced / perceived.

 whereas what is *actually* the case is that most of our lives -
science or not - are an "approximation that seems to do the job for
most use-cases".

 if we used the *actual* formula which *was* dead-accurate we'd go
completely insane... or all be total geniuses.  i'm reminded of a
story that a friend told me, about an eminent scientist and
mathematician friend.  he told him the joke, "a bird flies between two
trains that are on a collision course, at 60mph which start 120 miles
apart.  the bird turns around each time it reaches a train until
finally it's squashed.  how long does the bird fly for?"

 and after a couple of seconds his friend answered, "one hour!"

 so he asked, "you spotted that the time of the flight of the bird
isn't relevant, you can just use the trains to work out that they'll
meet in the middle, each travelling 60 miles, right?"

 and he replied, "oh no!  i just did the sum of an infinite series in
my head on the bird's travel flight between the trains".

 the usual example is the one about KE= 1/2 mv^2 being an
approximation when v <<< c but i thought the above true story would be
funnier.

l.