Aestu wrote:
There is only one reality. I am interested in figuring out what that reality is.
I am secure in my intelligence and don't feel compelled to aggrandize it by going through the motions of academic debate.
The more we learn about that reality, the more we find out it is an expression of probabilities and relative perceptions. Quantum physics shows us that everything exists as a probability wave until measured, and general relativity shows us that two people in relative motion don't even agree on how to perceive time and space. That is to say, there is only one reality, but you can't entirely know it. It's a little sloppy on the specifics a lot of the time.
And more often than not, someone unwilling to put their intelligence to the test of debate is mostly afraid of not feeling secure in it. As they say, the more you learn the more you realize you don't know. Or to rephrase, the more intelligence you have, the less secure you are in it and the more interested you are in expanding and refining it, through academics and debate.
Joklem wrote:
If the standard model of particle physics was shown to be wrong tomorrow (a simple case of showing that the predicted higgs boson does not exist, since it's the source of mass in the particles we know of in the theory), there would probably be more scientists, at least for a little while, fighting for it's survival or something of the sort (by attempting to show that the experiment was done wrong or something, assuming for this fictious example that it was done correctly) than scientists looking for new physics. It wouldn't even necessarily indicate stupidity - some would be skeptics, some are just humans and would attempt to save something familiar to them, and some would be just plain misguided or stupid. (keep in mind that it took years for the steady state universe theories to go away)
And this would be nothing new. Every major shift in our understanding of the world has been met with people unwilling to give up the old model just yet. It can even be a good thing, making the extoller of the new model work even harder to show his version is more accurate.
Even Einstein himself called quantum theory "spooky" and didn't like it at all.
Akina: bitch I will stab you in the face
(reality probably exists just the way we see it, it's just hard to figure out where all the smallest building blocks that we know of exactly are at a precise point in time and space, in which spin and energy states, and actually the uncertainty principle says that it's not possible to know all aspect of those systems at once)
