[/shameless self promotion]

Your comment:

It took until the 20th century for the savants to come up with the idea, after all. Is there any particular reason why the idea should be imprinted into every brain in the world only a generation after Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”?

is really unfortunate, and so I have to ask: Do you say the same thing about basic concepts in modern medicine? Or the atomic model? or DNA? All 20th century science. Of course, your reply will probably now be “but those are important to everyday life, and cosmology is not”, and I’ll roll my eyes in frustration at that point, since it would be missing the point, but then I’d offer no further argument.

Oh, and we’re in the 21st Century now, by the way.

Cheers,

-cvj

Did Singh’s patronisation of Batt in the Guardian help anybody? It just got his back up, and helped Batt make a fool of himself. But then again, the concept of the universe not having an edge or centre is difficult to grasp, and if no-one ever sat him down and explained it to him, why should he grasp it? It took until the 20th century for the savants to come up with the idea, after all. Is there any particular reason why the idea should be imprinted into every brain in the world only a generation after Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”?

With the number of scientists who are also teachers, you’d think that they’d treat the ignorant with just a little less contempt. Or is this how they treat their students also? If you want people to know, you don’t just lay the information on them with a verbal cudgel, you teach them.

If Singh had taken the time to meet up with Batt, talk about the structure of the universe, the nature of space-time, over a drink or two perhaps, maybe he would have lit a spark in Batt’s brain and he’d've produced a scientifically accurate song, full of appropriate imagery. As it is, Batt probably thinks Singh’s a twat now, and who can blame him?

Let’s agree on what is the spirit of the thought -if not the detail- and move on.

-cvj

What you do instead is tacitly assume that the listener has an agreement that you’re roughly talking about the same framework. I’m not talking about experts here: We all should get some idea about what that basic framework is from keeping up on what’s going on in science world the same way we keep up with what Brad and Angelina are doing or what the football league tables are, or what the current world economic conditions are: Books, magazines, tv, radio, popular talks on topics by your local university professors, whatever. (Entertainment TV and movies too, if I had my way about it.) If the framework is not mentioned at all, it is usually safe to say that you’re using the prevailing framework, and not an alternative that has less support from the current data, etc, etc. Until the data require us to move to a new model, we stick with the one we’ve got. This is how an active scientific field works, and this is what I referred to in the comment.

By your reasoning, any number is totally arbitrary since we might change our assumptions about the framework of physics – maybe for some good reason- artitrarily far in the future and then that number’s value becomes arbitrary. That is, I hope you agree an utterly ridiculous way to proceed, and you render science powerless if you proceeed this way.

Everyone: This is the central point of what we’re discussing here – not whether some idiot song writer can use Google or not, but whether the discussion and other reporting about it that I spoke of in the post are reinforcing the public’s view that what science does is arbitrary or not: “why bother getting it right…you can’t prove it one way or another”, or “It’ll only change next year anyway so it does not matter”…etc.

All those people wringing their hands and bleating until they’re blue in the face regularly expressing understandable concerns about the Intelligent Design non-debate/debate should be just as concerned about this prevailing (and perhaps growing) attitude, and it is amazing to me that they can’t see that.

Cheers.

-cvj

-cvj