I am in the mood for scientific stuff -- interesting theories, ideas, mysteries, etc.

[Kalashnikov]

id read the mismeasure of man by stephen jay gould.

makes you wonder about science as a whole

I'd have to disagree with you on that. That book is only a critique of psychometrics throughout the years and does not negate the many discoveries of modern sciences such as chemistry or physics.

Would you elaborate about which branches of science this book makes you wonder?

** Edited to mention that I forgot to add the fact that Gould's book is also heavily influenced by his political ideas, and by the fact that the book itself was a direct response to The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrstein.

 

[OMGWTFBBQ]

The human body is an oddly shaped toroid.

 

[Pikaia]

oddly shaped toroid.

I just shat out one of those

 

[juiceddreadlocks]

I'd have to disagree with you on that. That book is only a critique of psychometrics throughout the years and does not negate the many discoveries of modern sciences such as chemistry or physics.

Would you elaborate about which branches of science this book makes you wonder?

well the critique of the bell curve was actually not part of the mismeasure of man, it was an adendum sp?. the content of the book does elude to some of his thoughts regarding the fallacies of the bell curve.

if i had a copy of the paper i just wrote on it at work id send it to you, but manana i will post it if you want me to.

IT just makes me wonder about the biases present in science or as he refers to them as "priori conclusions" The implications of Binet's IQ tests and the gross misinterpretations of its intended uses to me show how "results" from "data" from "science" can be interpreted creatively to show anything pretty much. The insight that the book gives into the use of "data" and the evolution of how scientists viewed raw data from studies makes me wonder how many discoveries or things we take for granted today came from people going into science experiments or sociological surveys with prior conclusions just looking to back up their already thought out conclusions.

Keep in mind that im not in any way discrediting an intuitive hypothesis or the notion of a null hypothesis which Gould fails to discuss in this book.

p.s. the experiment where the georgia physician attributes blacks laziness to inefficient decarboxylation of the blood and suggests annointing the body with oil and applying it with a leather strap is hilarious, and a good representative sample of what those kinds of ideas led to people taking to be reality.

 

[samoth]

That is a pretty interesting fact. Is steven hawkings book easy to understand for an average guy? Or is the language hard to understand?

Hawking has two kinds of books... the ones written at a high school level, which require no prior knowledge, such as the ones mentioned here... and the more techinal ones which require a knowledge of higher level mathematics, such as the one done with Penrose.

Other good authors on cosmology and particle physics that are more complicated than Hawking's simpleton books are Gribbin, Feynman and Barrow.

I honestly think if you have one of Hawking's basic cosmology books, you have them all. They repeat themselves quite a bit. However, he put a complicated subject in a beautifully simplified form.

 

[WODIN]

The Universe in the beginning was populated with nothing but pure energy. The temperatures were beyond comprehension so every known and unknown force was decoupled from each other existing separately and independently.

As the Universe cooled off (within minutes) the forces started to combine. The most abundant particles was a see of electrons and anti-electrons. Now, if there were any equal amount of each that does not mean they were equally distributed. And as they annihalate they release energy not only in the form of light, but in the form of heat. Apparently either through a slight difference in the number of each or just in the statistics of the whole game, matter won out over antimatter.

I am working on magnetic nozzles for fusion drive engines. The fuel will be the plasma created in a fusion reactor at the temperatures of the inner sun. We will cool this down to about 300Mev from 50,000Mev by injecting H2 into the plasma.

This will give us Isp's in the range of 100,000s which will allow us to go to Jupiter in 6 months and Mars in 6 days. At some point we will be able to go to the nearest star within a couple years of travel time or less.

Fascinating...and damn frighting as well. One extreamly minor error and poof.