20 November 2008
I like boating. When I'm out at sea I get a chance to think clear without the phone ringing or some one dropping by to interupt my chain of thought. When you navigate a boat you use your last known position and dead reckoning. If you know which direction you are going and your speed, you end up with a guess of where you are. You can then check your bearings agianst things you know to be true, to get a more accurate location, using lines of position.
Things can place you off course such as the direction of the wind, tides, and drift.
When explorers first set out across an unknown sea they had no idea what lay before them. They only knew how far they were from a known point. Science is a lot like exploring by boat. There are things we known to be true, for example, if you drop a rock from a latter it falls to the ground, rather then floating away. The reason we know this to be true is because anyone can test the concept, you can go up latter and drop a rock. It doesn't matter if you drop the rock, or if your brother does, it will always fall to the ground. The fact that a rock falls does not depend on who drops it, it's objective, and repeatable.
When your navigating a boat, you depend on facts, nautical charts are maps of things know in a body of water. Individual variables, such as other boats, floating logs, and other things may change, but for those things which are fixed, and predictable, the charts are a life saver literally. You can plot your course according to these, but you might not ever pilot a boat 100% based on those plans due to other boats and unknown objects in your way. The planned trip is a theory of how you will get your boat from A to B. Columbus had a theory he could access the riches of the far east by going west, the theory was that the planet was round, he was right, he just didn't know America was in his way.
There seems to be an ongoing debate as to whether or not Evolution is a fact or a theory.
I am not going to make this post part of that debate, however I would like to comment on whether or not the persons in the debate understand the terminology in question.
There are classes of facts. All facts can be tested, those tests can be done by anyone and end up with the same results. But some facts fall into categories, there are facts which do not require any kind of special knowledge ahead of the current fact. Such as a rock will fall when dropped, but there are facts that do require understanding about other facts, such as Newton's Theory of Gravity. You would have to have a basic concept of what mass means. An in order to understand what a scientist views what mass means, you'd also have to understand what energy means, and matter are. The list goes on from there. The interesting point however is that Newton's Laws describe what happens when you drop a rock. A theory is a description.
Theories describe what people see, or rather, a collection of observations, and make predictions that can be measured in the future. Facts are repeatable observations of past events. Some elements of Evolution are facts, some are predictions of what we are going to see as we dig deeper. It's a chart, and were not sure if another theory is going to get in our way like a boat on the high seas.
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Friday, 02 March 2007
I like boating. When I'm out at sea I get a chance to think clear without the phone ringing or some one dropping by to interupt my chain of thought....
© 2008 - Wolfe's Blog
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