Comments on: Neil DeGrasse Tyson in votive candle form

By: Tim Anderson

Tim Anderson — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:37:00 +0000

reminiscent of my personally designed candle of Taint Gary Busey

By: evilJaze

evilJaze — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:08:00 +0000

Did you mean “its” twitter?

By: Jean Baptiste

Jean Baptiste — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 01:37:00 +0000

But but but Science is TRUUUUUE…..whether or not you believe in it….

By: joshua a

joshua a — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Nah, it’s actually a direct quote. He said it on Real Time last year.

By: David Romer

David Romer — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 21:27:00 +0000

There’s a problem. It has 9 planets behind his head. Not 8.

By: Jewels Vern

Jewels Vern — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:10:00 +0000

I agree with the first viewpoint: scientists would rather be wrong than uncertain.

By: tristan eldritch

tristan eldritch — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:32:00 +0000

To be honest, I’m not sure what my point was either, I just thought it sounded funny! But I guess my thinking was something along the lines of when DeGrasse Tyson says “Science is true whether we believe it or not” one would query what precisely he means. Good science? Current science? Scientific method or what people call the scientific worldview or philosophy? Some people find the primary appeal of science in that it appears to offer hard, incontrovertible, nailed-down for all time truths; for others, the appeal lies more in a recognition of the provisional, work in progress nature of knowledge acquisition, the sense that nothing is necessarily true for the long haul, everything is subject to be revised, improved, or scrapped. There is a degree of validity to both viewpoints (and Tyson’s quote would seem to appeal to the first), but if you are more sympathetic to the Popperian view of scientific method as a self-correcting rather than ideal state of affairs, then a statement like “Science is true” would be a little problematical, or at least oversimplified. I’ve always enjoyed the passage from Popper where he says that neither democracy or science are ideal states of affairs in themselves, but their virtue lies in allowing us to change things when people really start fucking up. So I guess my point was a Popperian riposte to De Grasse’s more gung-ho sentiment (which I actually thought was what you were getting at too), combined with a quote from William James that’s always been in the back of my head: “There is no noncircular set of criteria for knowing whether a particular belief is true, no appeal to some standard outside the process of coming to the belief itself. For thinking just is a circular process, in which some end, some imagined outcome, is already present at the start of any train of thought….”

And now, my friend, I bet you’re sorry you asked!

By: monkey magic

monkey magic — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:23:00 +0000

The difference being: science is the name given to finding out how the universe works; an ongoing process of refinement or: religion where you are told how it works; there’s no search for the truth. But I may be wrong: I am still refining the truth.

By: noah django

noah django — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 07:13:00 +0000

its missing the Carl Sagan one that says “smoke weed e’reday”

By: erratic

erratic — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 05:12:00 +0000

I don’t like this quote for the same reason that was already pointing out, but also because I grew up hearing this basic quote from the most closed minded of religious adherents as “The good thing about (my religion) is that it’s true whether or not you believe it to be true”. It’s a thought stopping mechanism and a communication killer.

By: Jewels Vern

Jewels Vern — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 05:05:00 +0000

I’m not sure what your point is. Most arguments in science are settled by one side outliving the other. For example, hand washing is considered important because all the doctors who thought it was junk science have died.

By: tristan eldritch

tristan eldritch — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 02:38:00 +0000

Science: The best method we currently have at our disposal for figuring out which half of science is true.

By: hungryjoe

hungryjoe — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:24:00 +0000

The people who made this misunderstand “Science” in the same way that creationists do.

By: Forced2Register

Forced2Register — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 23:38:00 +0000

It’s not that I “believe” in science… I just know that what science says is based on experiments I can double check if i don’t believe something

By: Jewels Vern

Jewels Vern — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 23:37:00 +0000

I have to disagree with the quote in the picture. Several scientists have said that at least half of what they believed is not true, but they didn’t know which half.

By: crenquis

crenquis — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:07:00 +0000

One can get Einstein, Hawking, and Ronald Mallet — the Patron Saints of Time Travel — from 826LA’s Time Travel Mart:
http://826la.org/store/decorative-dowry/patron-saint-of-time-travel-candle-set.html

By: dioptase

dioptase — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:30:00 +0000

Neil, stop corrupting young minds! Science isn’t true. Science could be called the process of finding what is true. Or we could say science appears to be true, subject to new evidence. But saying science is true diminishes science.

And those sheep? They are black on the side facing us.

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:27:00 +0000

http://www.etsy.com/listing/124748451/science-gawds-prayer-candle-set-bill-nye

By: Joe Nolan

Joe Nolan — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:48:00 +0000

A light in the darkness.

By: edgore

edgore — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:06:00 +0000

As opposed to Jesus, that black churchy guy.

By: edgore

edgore — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:04:00 +0000

Pretty sure you are right on that, and I am guessing the quote beneath the picture is pulled from this:

““Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.” ”

By: anon0mouse

anon0mouse — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:50:00 +0000

Science damn you!

By: Navin_Johnson

Navin_Johnson — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:46:00 +0000

A white power troll too, I see after looking at their twitter.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:40:00 +0000

Yes, I shall take a time-out as penance now.

By: TooGoodToCheck

TooGoodToCheck — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:37:00 +0000

I regret to inform you, sir, that you are feeding the troll

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:34:00 +0000

what is with you nerds and your obsession with this black science guy

What is it with you ignorant blowhards and your obsession with a science guy’s skin color?

By: bobchadwick

bobchadwick — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:24:00 +0000

I’ve often wondered the same thing about that white churchy guy, the pope.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:20:00 +0000

My thoughts exactly!

By: ldobe

ldobe — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:19:00 +0000

What’s not to like? He’s said a lot of inspiring things about science, he’s an astrophysicist and president of the Hayden Planetarium in NY.

He’s good for science generally. He’s helping to inform the public, and making science a little more accessible to everyone.

Also, he’s a funny guy and doesn’t take himself too seriously. And when he’s chatting with laypeople on the air, he can bring up relevant scientific topics to contribute to what people are talking about.

By: Incipient Madness

Incipient Madness — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:01:00 +0000

We don’t need to know how you got your repetitive stress injury.

Oh, I see that you are talking about the position of his hands in the picture. I thought you TMI’d us there.