Originally Posted by Hain

EDIT: I am not an architect, but I had a similar conversation with a colleague at my school about the Tacoma Bridge, and her professor stressed to her that "Someone's ass was held responsible" for not considering the natural frequency of the bridge.

Originally Posted by KnifeMissile

I feel as if I have died and fallen into hell. There are some really poor descriptions of science in this thread. There's too many for me to respond to all of them but most have been perpetrated by xepherys so I'll respond to some of his claims...

Why do you insist on running to a dictionary as an authority on meaning? Admittedly, I do the same when engaged in colloquial language but it's not a good idea to do so when talking about specific fields, like science. Every organized endeavor has its own jargon and science is no exception. Compare the dictionary meaning of displacement with the physical definition, for an example...

Are you a creationist now?!

First of all, theories will never ever "graduate" to fact. That's not how the term is used. Do you think we doubt that atoms exist? If not then why is it still called the atomic theory? Theories don't even "graduate" to laws. Do you really think that we ever referred to Newton's theories of motion? ...or the theories of thermodynamics? That's not how the term is used...

This leads to my second point, which is that scientific "laws" aren't really any different than scientific "theories." Like in English, synonyms exist in science and that's what these two words are. The use of the term "law" in science came into vogue at a time when science (particularly physics) was starting to mature rapidly but wasn't, itself, well studied. Back then, scientists had romantic notions of "unlocking the secrets of the Universe!" They felt that they were discovering absolute and final truths about how the Universe worked and so some principles seemed to warrant the title of law.

Of course, science has matured quite a bit since then and is now a little more formalized. The three laws of thermodynamics didn't really make sense without the zeroeth law, Newton's second law of motion isn't true in the general sense and the first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy, can be temporarily violated. Hell, the first law of thermodynamics is just a special case of conservation of energy so how is it really so fundamental?

Scientific laws tend to be more axiomatic and descriptive than scientific theories but what is labelled a "law" or a "theory" is mostly aesthetic. They are both tentative descriptions of how we think the Universe works and they are really no different from each other.

In science, "fact" is synonymous with "observation."

Again, theories will never be "graduated" to "laws" or "facts", regardless of how much evidence or apparent truth is behind them. The terms are simply not used that way. By the way, there is no part of special relativity that hasn't been demonstrable. In every way, it appears to be true...

Actually, the word "metaphysics" translates literally to "after physics," denoting Aristotle's work that came after his work on physics. The word is currently used as you describe it but your etymology was simply wrong...


Actually, I'm surprised I didn't have more to say. There's probably much more to comment on but this thread was so painful to read that I don't think I can bear to read it over again...

Originally Posted by Rudel73

Thank you! I mostly lurk, but as a scientist reading what people have been saying was making me want to tear my hair out! I agree 100% with what you said, and you sir, saved me a lot of time for not having to write that up on my own!