The more interesting question is why they continue to feed at the public teat?

It keeps them off the street and away from children.

Unfortunately not away from schoolchildren, who they pump this science guff into.

Most impressively, Greene was mentioned in an episode of Angel.

Oh, the ironies of people using their computers to gripe about science!

(And no, don't tell me computers are simply engineering: transistor and silicon chip development required lots of physics.)

Once we understand that we can't experience or comprehend reality directly, we understand that all human knowledge is metaphor.

What I love is the direct quote "In fact, given its unprovability, it might be "permanently safe" (Glashow again) from meaningful refutation."
And this is different from Religion how?
Mike Daley

"Oh, the ironies of people using their computers to gripe about science!"

What he said.

String theory isn't testable yet not because it makes no testable predictions, but because it requires levels of experimental energy that we don't yet know how to handle in the lab. It's tendentious to assume that because in 2004 we can't yet settle its validity, that we never will.

String theory is highly worth thinking about because it is one of very few physical theories we have that offers even the possibility of reconciling quantum mechanics (which we know is experimentally validated, but incomplete) and general relativity (which we also know is validated but incomplete). The point is not that it is the only such theory or that it should be accepted as dogma without experimental evidence, but that working scientists earn their paychecks by *working*: and when you have two partial theories, working means spending a lot of time and energy figuring out how to reconcile them.

"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education." --Wilson Mizner

The problem with String Theory is that it is unfalsifiable. Whenever the theory diverges from percieved reality, they just add another folded dimension.

David:

By doubt the scientific mean only doubt about your religion, not theirs.

I need to be instructed about the teleology of, say, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Well, it's false, so it can only be describing what the theorist desires.

oj,

No, we "scientific" do indeed mean doubt about our scientific work. That's why it's possible to have a rational argument about whether string theory is valid or not, and why a fair number of physicists don't agree with string theory (or at least don't see it as an effective project in 2004 A.D.)

If you want to see what a society looks like that doesn't have us "scientific" dissidents in it, just look at the Muslim world. No Brian Greenes *there*. The Muslims made up their minds long ago about the pointlessness of human efforts to rationally understand objective reality. Observe the consequences, and ask yourself if you really want to see those annoying scientists stop their work.

"Science, also, must be divorced from curiosity. The business of science, [Tolstoy] says, is not to discover what happens, but to teach men how they ought to live. So also with history and politics. Many problems (for example, the Dreyfus Case) are simply not worth solving, and he is willing to leave them as loose ends. Indeed his whole theory of 'crazes' or 'epidemic suggestions', in which he lumps together such things as the Crusades and the Dutch passion of tulip growing, shows a willingness to regard many human activities as mere ant-like rushings to and fro, inexplicable and uninteresting. Clearly he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. 'Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?' In a way the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost. And if the old man knows of the existence of this feeling, the effect is merely to increase his irritation: he would make children senile, if he could."

--George Orwell, _Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool_

Yet it does teach men lies about how they ought to live.

What is, then, the true statement about what the Second Law treats?

Some things are entropic

I am just not in favor of throwing money a problems nobody has the vaguest idea of solving.

Which things are not?

Those which intelligence chooses to intervene in.

According to you, that's everything.

Yet the Second Law works everywhere we look.

Or nowhere. Life here keeps getting more organized. The laws of physics seem to have been tweaked several times to bring us about. The Universe appears to follow a set plan.

OJ seems to have real problems with the concept of a closed system.

The Earth is not a closed system.

Never mind problems with organization. Life is no more organized now than 300 million years ago.

The eye sees.

Or, as Lynn Margulies put it, wherever there is one photon available to be exploited, life will find it and exploit it.

But life does not create the photons.

How often your habit of induction forces you to make absurd statements that even you would not dare to act on.

Yet photons were Created

OJ:

And the eye saw 300 million years ago, too. Every bit as well as eyes see now.

Oddly, considering another related thread, your capital Created suggests you have certain knowledge of how photons came to be.