Speculations Of An Immaterialist

[poliphilo]

There's a woman in Montana who has extracted blood cells and soft tissue from dinosaur bones. They said it couldn't be done, but it has been and everything we believed about fossilization (that dead dinos turn to stone and have about as much life in them as Michelangelo's David) turns out to be nonsense. I love it when accepted science turns to mush, don't you?

The next thing will be to sequence the DNA and after that we'll have to start building Jurassic Park. Don't tell me it's impossible because I simply don't believe you. If we want something badly enough we'll think our way to the science.

Actually I'm not at all sure that the Laws of Nature (so called) don't accomodate themselves to our desires. We invent the telescope and the universe expands to give us something to look at.  Ditto dinosaurs, Did they really exist before we started dreaming of a grander prehistory than the Book of Genesis could supply us with?  What's 65 million years- the length of time between them and us- if there's no-one around to tear the pages off on the calendar?

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

You're in danger of turning into Bishop Berkeley!

This is a possible but, by its nature, untestable hypothesis. It's attractive in one way, but I don't find it more so than science - which hasn't really turned to mush, after all. The disproving of hypotheses and the refinement of techniques is just science proceeding along normal lines, and the Montana woman wouldn't have been able to do what she did without standing on the shoulders of Crick, Watson and the rest. To say that the world accommodated itself to her (and our) desire comes close to robbing her of the credit for the work she did, and the centuries of work that made that work possible - and in return it gives us the thrill of a bit of magical thinking. That doesn't seem a good exchange.

"The more I practise, the luckier I get," as a famous golfer is said to have observed. We can say that science has been lucky in showing us what it has (in this case and innumerable others), but the practice is what got it there.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's not science I'm against- just the cocksureness of scientists who can't stand to have their orthodoxies challenged. The woman (she was on telly last night) said she'd had a paper rejected because the adjudicator refused to accept the data. Science is great, but scientists (some of them) can be as bigoted as bishops.

I like Berkeley. He's pretty much irrefutable, I think. Which (I acknowledge) isn't the same as being right.

I don't doubt the history of evolution- not really- but I do also think the universe is rather more timey-wimey than we conventionally allow. And I believe this view of things is supported by science itself. We know we're living in a quantum universe but we're still thinking in Newtonian terms.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'd happily subscribe to all of that.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

I saw the same programme last night and i thought "good for her to sticking with her guns and having the data as empirical proof that she was right" against the current orthodoxy. I agree that she wouldn't be able to get that far without the pioneering work of Criok et all. But paradigm shifts do happen, and that dinosaurs will be entering a new phase of investigation, and that their bird like features will become more prominent as research continues. I also agree that we should look at space and time as discrete packets of information and not the smooth continuum in Newtonian thinking. Lee Smolin, an advocate of quantum loop gravity, believes that our Newtonian thinking should be ditched in favour of a quantised fuzzy realm of reality.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The Newtonian model has been supplanted- but our culture still treats it as if it held good- I suppose because it works for most practical purposes.

[kishenehn.livejournal.com]

Wow ... this hasn't even made the news out here, at least anything that I've seen.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

This is happening on your patch, right? The research is going on at a place called something like the Rocky Mountains University or the University of the Rocky Mountains.

[kishenehn.livejournal.com]

I actually had to do a fair amount of Googling to find this. ... the British TV and newspaper spots were current, but most of the accounts in the American media were a few years old. It looks like the woman involved (who is fairly controversial) is now teaching at a university in North Carolina, though she completed her education at the university in the town where I live. (And the dinosaur bones she's worked with were found here in Montana.)