Speaker #2: Dr. Michael Albrow , physicist at FermiLab, talking about “What’s True and What’s Untrue in Physics Today?”
Opening joke: please take away from this that physics is much simpler than biology! 🙂
Some knowledge is as certain as certain can be, while some things are necessarily uncertain. There is much we know is not possible, but there is much which we know is also outside of our domain.
The beginning of modern science probably started with Galileo and his conflict with the Church. Differences between science & religion…
Science:
*distrust authority / only Nature is authority
*criticism encouraged
*all hypotheses are testable by repeatable experiments / observations
*try to fault existing theories, make progress
*theory = explanation
*disagreements are healthy
*accepted standards of statistics & evidence
Religion/Nonsense/Nonscience:
*dogmatic
*questioning / criticism not encouraged
*not fundamentally upheld to testing
*”theory” = speculation
*disagreements discouraged / when scientists disagree that mans they’re wrong
*poor understanding or misuse of statistics & numbers
The Skeptical Teacher 