re: chuck - ten major u.s. disasters on sig Chuck, science does talk in assumptions and create theories but we are getting admixtures of deterministic and indeterministic assumptions that then are responsible for the current confusion in the social as well as the physical sciences.
Scientists need to be more consciously deterministic and good science needs to be heard but there are powerful cultural and vested interests promoting what is called ........ indeterminism or the belief that some effects may not have material causes. There are people like Paul Davies who parade as scientists, who do not depend simply on finding a relationship between cause and effect to demonstrate their belief in causality. We see compromises with indeterminism that produce concocted theories that are quite stooooopid.
Pardon this example for being somewhat self indulgent but ..... Like when I was about thirteen I had an excellent teacher who explained the steady state theory and the big bang theory in some extracurricular lessons at the end of the year. I remember saying to the teacher that the big bang theory did not make commonsense. He said that the inspiration for the theory came from the splitting the atom but couldn't explain who split the big one. Since then there has been a never-ending effort to prove this over-riding theory and it has developed many strange fruit indeed.
My concern is simple ....... it is why and where did all the good science go?
