Old JRowe has had a hard week, he has seen his idea that he labeled rather pompously as "theory" demoted to the meanest of a ragged conjecture. He issued a challenge that has made him upset as he feels people on the forum have broken his rules!
Let's examine his challenge and see what it was all about....over to JRowe.....
Hi! Want me to leave the site? I know a fair few of you do. So, here's a challenge.
If you can meet the requirements, I will leave this site for a minimum of three months. Maybe more, depends what I'm doing when those three months are up. That's a whole quarter of a year you get to have fun without me talking about DET. Enjoy!
Plus, mods, if/when I concede you are more than welcome to ban my account for the aforementioned period of time.
A lot of people have objected to DET and the definition of evidence I use.
I outline the full model here, the overview of evidence is at the end: http://dualearththeory.proboards.com/thread/3
The basic summary is that evidence for a theory is:
a) An observation that is explained by said theory, when
b) That theory does not rely on more assumptions than any alternatives.
(Assumptions being anything not proven or based on evidence. However, clearly assumptions have consequences. if A implies B, and both A and B need to hold for a theory, then there is still just one assumption, A).
The Challenge
If this definition is not good enough, then provide just one example of either:
1. A piece of evidence for a model which is not just an observation in line with what said model states.
2. A theory which all observations are in line with, that relies on minimal assumptions, which is not based on evidence.
Quick caveats: experiments are just a special case of observations, they are perfectly in line with this definition, so they should not be used as a response to 1 as I've seen. Equally, God is not a response to 2 as God does not minimize assumptions; each separate trait is its own assumption.
I await your responses.
For so long as this challenge goes unmet, you must acknowledge that the definition of evidence I used holds; 1 prevents it being too narrow, 2 prevents it being too accepting. And if you're a user who stumbled onto this post after it died, and the challenge remains unmet, you are more than welcome to resurrect the thread if you have a response.
As ever, I'm eager to hear any valid objections.Now if one reads part one of his challenge he says...
1. A piece of evidence for a model which is not just an observation in line with what said model states. What does he actually mean by that?....some evidence for a model.....ok so far.....which is not just an observation in line with what the model states.
Though I fundamentally disagree with his definition of what evidence is.
When we think about evidence let's find out what some more credible people have said about this. Philosophers, such as Karl R. Popper, have provided influential theories of the scientific method within which scientific evidence plays a central role. Popper provides that a scientist creatively develops a theory which may be falsified by testing the theory against evidence or known facts. Popper's theory presents an asymmetry in that evidence can prove a theory wrong, by establishing facts that are inconsistent with the theory. In contrast, evidence cannot prove a theory correct because other evidence, yet to be discovered, may exist that is inconsistent with the theory. So where does that leave us?
A person's assumptions or beliefs about the relationship between observations and a hypothesis, let's say JRowe, will affect whether that person takes the observations as evidence. These assumptions or beliefs will also affect how a person utilizes the observations as evidence. For example, the Earth's apparent lack of motion may be taken as evidence for a geocentric cosmology. However, after sufficient evidence is presented for heliocentric cosmology and the apparent lack of motion is explained, the initial observation is strongly discounted as evidence.
A great place to really learn about testing scientific theories, though in this case it's a pretty dumb conjecture, Is Understanding Science 101" course taught at University of California - Berkeley: why re-invent the wheel.
What it basically teaches is that Science neither proves nor disproves. It accepts or rejects ideas based on supporting and refuting evidence, but may revise those conclusions if warranted by new evidence or perspectives.
Conventional science that JRowe pretends to understand, teaches about the nature of our sun, partly through observation, but also through experimentation. Currently there are hundreds of on going experiments that are trying to understand the workings of the Sun. For example sun spots and their eleven year cycles. Sun spots ca be seen by projecting the sun's light from a lens onto a piece of card. They have been know about for over 300 years.
http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/segwayed/lessons/sunspots/Worksheets/sspot_back12.htmlMy answer to his challenge is to do with our understanding of sunspots and coronal mass ejections, which neither could occour under his conjecture. It's something he fails to mention, let alone explain in his conjecture, but which are an esential part of our sun's inner workings and something that may affect us here on earth. To remind readers JRowe claims the sun is made from a combination of stone and metal, types unknow, none of which could produce sun spots or coronal mass ejections, especially when he maintains the location of the sun to be at the centre of the earth.
Conventional science has established what the sun is made from and how it's energy is produced in a sustainable manner, via an ongoing fusion reaction where atoms of hydrogen are fused into Helium releasing vast amounts of energy. In this reaction that occours at very high temperatures and pressures there is mass 'lost' when an atom of Helium is produced from 2 atoms of hydrogen and it's this lost mass that Is converted into energy. And we know this from good old E = MC^2
This fusion process is in line with our understanding of both particle physics and quantum mechanics. JRowe in his conjecture does not describe a method by which this energy could be produced, all he makes mention of is friction! I think this is a subject he knows a lot about!
His conjecture is a stand alone piece of wishful thinking that has no evidence, credible or otherwise and is directly opposed to the laws of nature.