Category: Science
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 6 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark It’s time for the sixth tool. So far you have got the facts (1 of 10), you had a substantive debate (2 of 10), you’ve covered arguments from authority (3 of 10), you have several hypotheses (4 of…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 5 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Half way through this thread and so far you have got the facts (1 of 10), you had a substantive debate (2 of 10), you know how to treat arguments from authority (3 of 10) and most recently…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 4 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark So, you’ve got the facts (1 of 10) and you’ve had a substantive debate (2 of 10) and now (Sagan’s third tool for detecting baloney) how to consider arguments from authority (3 of 10). The next tool…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 3 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark So, you’ve got the facts (1 of 10) and you’ve had a substantive debate (2 of 10), now you need to consider Sagan’s third tool for detecting baloney: Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 2 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark In my last blog, The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science, I referred to Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” as a set of…
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“The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.”
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, extracted from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Rules for critical thinking (1 of 10): Carl Sagan developed a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods. But the kit, Sagan argues,…
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“The wondrous thing about science is that nobody knows the right answer.”
Dr. Becky Smethurst, Astrophysicist. Science Communicator. Author. The full quote from the preface of her book (Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time) is: “The wondrous thing about science is that nobody knows the right answer. This is not how we are taught science as…
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Are comets and shooting stars the same?
Caption: Perseid Meteor from UK 12-13 Aug 2021 (credit in ALT) I was asked this question during a recent talk on stargazing. Easy question to answer, was my first thought. I started with confirming that they were indeed different phenomena and went on to discuss where comets came from, their usual long orbits (unless they…
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“The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.”
– Lawrence Krauss: “A Universe from Nothing” “… It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution – weren’t created at the beginning of time.”…
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“I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.”
– Stephen Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018) An extract from an interview by Roger Highfield in Daily Telegraph (16 October 2001) where Hawking says, “Colonies in space may be our only hope.” There are certainly a lot of accidents that could befall humanity – and not just the ones we think we…
Stargazing Guy 