How reliable is science? (The limitations of science)

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 11, 2012, 15:39 (4610 days ago) @ dhw

For instance, Tony raised the issue of dating techniques. (I googled this, and got some interesting information which I shan't show my wife!) How can we possibly be certain that Filler's Ugandan vertebrae are 21 million years old? The mind can barely encompass that sort of time scale ... let alone figures like 13.75 billion years (big bang), 5 billion years (Earth), 3.4 billion years (life on Earth). Google different websites and you will get different figures, but they are generally around the same, give or take a meagre (hundred) million years or so. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but is there ANY method of dating that does not rely on certain factors being constant? And how on Earth can we be sure that over all these thousands of millions of years, there have been any such constants? -The word used is 'proxies' in the climate debate papers. Tree rings, trapped CO2 in glacier ice, isotopes with known half-life, etc., etc. Everything is an approximation, but they all can be manipulated to create chaos. As in Mann's hockey stick which got rid of an actually measured Little Ice Age at its tail end in America. Too much grant money with too much political pressure behind it.-As for figures above, accepted corrections: Sun 5 billion, Earth 4.5 billion, life as early as 3.8 billion, but very debated, 3.6 much more likely, and 3.4 is a definite for the moment. All by proxy. Remember we don't even actually measure air temperature. At first we expanded mercury. We should be measuring the velocity of gas molecules in the air. Simply put, everything is a proxy. so what, we have to accept that to do science. It is the unscrupulous who get us into trouble. And peer review fascilitates by using group think pressure. Matt take note.