G'day Sam,
I've been trying quite hard to get what you are suggesting in this thread but can't quite wrap my head around it.
Why should you need to get a new theory if two incompatable explanations of evidence exist, for instance? Could it be that one of the two works fine but there is just more evidence that has yet to be uncovered or because of circumstance that evidence is lost.
Dinosaurs went extinct because of a meteor. It fits a great deal of the evidence but not all of it. Trouble is that it is possible that it, and other explanations might be all partly correct, or the meteor one is completely correct but the evidence is gone. 65 million years has been enough to wipe out the primary evidence so all that is left is speculation.
I think I understand your point about scientists making assumptions. It's actually amazing that when peer review occurs to many scientific papers, the basic assumptions are rarely questioned. Sometimes that's because everyone thinks those assumptions are well settled. But at other times I really have to wonder. Is this something like what you are getting at?
I was given a paper two days ago by a scientist in Britain that did a considerable amount of research demonstrating that Urban Effect had no real influence on the world's average temperature records over the last century or so. The assumptions he started with where truly breathtaking in their lack of support but they were not challenged anywhere. One assumption was that urban effect had to be greater on the warmest days. Sounds logical but there was no imperical data to back this up. Another was that urban effect would effect temperatures by a negligible amount on windy days. This one was the basis of the whole paper, yet there was no attempt to support the assumption at all. An assumption that I would suggest really made the whole thing a wasted exercise was that prevailing winds due to major weather patterns could be relied upon to establish that a particular day in a particular city was windy (this was done because the data that was available generally does not include wind intensity at all and even if it does it does not generally record it at the time of minimum temperature). His examination of the records showed that weather patterns for China actually caused the cities to warm up when he had assumed they would cool down yet even this did not cause him to wonder whether the assumption was correct.
I started thinking of simple physics experiments and a block of warm concrete. What would this do to air circulation? If there was a fan set up to blow across the block, would the warmth of the block change the air flow? Would the movement of air cause the block's extra temperature to drop to the surrounding ambient temperature in a short time? Think of a city on a winter's day. From studies of Berlin's urban effect and what it does to night time temperatures, to winter's days and nights etc, the assumptions actually didn't hold up all that well, but this paper was submitted to a professor who found no fault with the assumptions. It obtained funding and no one questioned the assumptions. It was peer reviewed and no one questioned the assumptions. It is now used as a the primary paper by a very large institute for many other research projects as their reference why urban effect has minimal effect on temperature and therefore does not need to be considered. And during all of this not one person thought to question the basic assumptions that the author used to base the whole paper on.
Interestingly, I was having quite a pleasant email chat with the professor mentioned about problems with data. The conversation abruptly ended when I made the comment that I wondered about the assumptions made in the paper in question and whether there was any observations made by others on which the author could rely.
I know this is in the wrong topic but I'm using an example that I understand to see if this is what Sam's underlying supposition is. What is a "fact"? Is that a similar query to why do scientists seem to use assumptions for studies when there is little or no evidence to back up that assumption? And how far do we go? Do we have to take every scientific discussion back to the basic principals and ensure that each is valid before we can build on it, or is it safe to assume that these "facts" are, well, "facts"?
Sam, is this close to what you are putting across? Or am I really off the track?
Richard
