You guys view scientific theory like most religious nuts view God. Modern Day Science IS your religion. You have blind faith in published works ignoring margins of error and accepting it as truth. It exists because someone told you it does, and it's in some book. Therefore it's true and there's no other reason for it to have happened. Period. Then if someone comes along and proves that it's wrong, you change your story to fit the new formula. You'll explain it like the religious folks explain the great flood. They'll attempt to say it was a flooding of some valley region in the Middle East, so therefore we weren't wrong, but we just change beliefs a little and still hold that this it is the absolute and they just couldn't describe it well enough.
No speculation, no postulates... just blind faith that one theory supported by several people MUST be infallible. I told you I'm not getting into an argument again over observatory science. The aspects I'm interested in are apparently too big and/or too small for you to even comprehend. (and no, I'm not talking about objects so far away that they we see the light as they existed in the past. You are trying to read into what I said. I'm talking the properties of light as it travels in space... distorted by space dust or not...) I'm theorizing, based on the information I was given, alternatives to popular theory.
You assume popular theory must be right because it's popular. This gets back to my argument about the flat world. At one point it was popular. If you lived then, you would assume that the world was flat because that's what the evidence points to, but I digress. You thrive on regurgitating published data in some effort to boost your ego or some other reason that confounds me. I'm reminded of the snobby blonde guy in the bar in "Good Will Hunting" who is trying to prove he's smarter by repeating what he's read without even thinking about the material.
There a few ways to tackle it, unlike ampersand whose response was taken down, I didnt laugh. I sighed.
In science, there is nothing holy. Everything can be overturn and replace. Its a requirement of its self correcting nature. If Math were proven to be wrong, and something cam that was better, then math wouldn't be used as much. Eventually dropped all together. If the assumption about the universe proved false, then they would be dropped and replaced with news one that work better.
In demonstrating that science has no dogma, or tenets. If a better method for understanding the universe comes along, the scientific method would eventually no longer be used.
Science can't rely on faith. It doesn't ask for you. It just ask for your eyes. No one is stating these theories, these working tried and true models of the universe are without flaw.
Weakness in a theory doesn't mean that its worthless, or that it should question in its entirety. It should be recognized as such. Andir, doubt is a great thing. However, you need to learn on how to apply it. You need to learn what would be reasonable doubt.
What you have been doing, is nearly an embodiment of argument from ignorance. 'They simply can't know enough to judge anything' or 'how could they possibly know that'. There is no objective means to know when you know enough. The sci. method takes this into account by being internally self correcting.
Science goes 'With what we know, what conclusions may be draw.', bulking at every possible chance to be wrong would lead to no where.
Science never ask you to take anything as granted. It all there waiting for you to go look for yourself. What you haven't been doing is presenting anything counter evidence. You haven't been showing examples of why this may be. You've been asserting that since we can't possibly know enough or everything that it is wrong, or probably wrong.
If you want to discuss the demerits of a theory, that fine. I would find that entertaining. And it would expand my knowledge base of the subject matter. Can you describe with what at fault of how they draw these conclusions? Other then 'There no possible way for them to know for certain'. There isn't. It doesn't matter. We act as we do, and we move forward to see if it make sense with everything else.
If this red shift means that these celestial objects are moving further away what does this mean? What do we expect to see if we apply this to something else?
Empirical testing. A conversation on Doppler shift would be neat, a nice catalyst to learn more on the subject, which I admit I have a loose grasp on.
For Einstein theory to hold true then c must be constant. Even though its impossible to examine c at everywhere everytime through time, we can infer this must be the case. It an assumption. However its an assumption that has so far held up. The gravitational lensing affect, was used with pulsar, at 145 light years out for a galaxy cluster that something like 1m light years away. So it seems like c is constant for at least a million light years.
Though there are some holes in general and special relativity, it holds up remarkably well. Making it not unreasonable for its postulation of c to be true. Hell, I'll throw you a bone. It known that c may in fact vary by as much as
.4%, though from my understanding this margin affects the formula very little. There odd things about satellite positions, not being where they should be with gen. relativity. That paper is currently highly contested and is going through the bloody arena of which peer review is.
If you have doubts in a theory, then kudos. Please present why, and citation on current understanding doesn't explain observed phenomena, or please explain a tool of science which you find lacking and why. I haven't checked in a bit, by Dr. Phil Plait used to do a live Q&A, if he still does so we can get him to answer why light being adsorbed by dust isn't that much of a factor, or how do you compensate for it and why?
Doubt nice. An awesome thing. It needs to be tempered to be reasonable. Just doubting there ability, that been cultivated for astronomy, a few centuries seems silly without example of why.
And how could it be blind fait if I went, look into the understanding, observed myself and deem their conclusion reasonable.
And lets look at this thing trying to say that science is a popularity contest like high school. It backward.
The concession is gained from the evidence. The evidence is tested and debated. It eventually reaches a point where it deem to hold up reasonably well and deem acceptable. This isn't an easy task. And hell, the sci. method can even have bullshit studies get deem acceptable. But those studies are ignored if it no longer complies with future findings.
When speaking to a theory that has the concession of the community. Then what that says, it has been rigorously tested, examined and debated. It does the best job at explaining the current phomena.
Could you explain why science being amendable is somehow a weakness? That what I from your rant.
Also, which theories demerits and which of them would you like to talk about? Can you link to these other theories you spoke of? Or provide name for their authors so I and other can go look them up. As an open minded person, I'm all for entertaining new ideas.