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A note on apartments and bubbles
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At Aeon: Dark matter search derailed by dogma?
Question: Have we found more dark matter than fairies all this time?
The issues at stake are huge. Acceptance of dark matter has influenced scientific thinking about the birth of the Universe, the evolution of galaxies and black holes, and the fundamental laws of physics. Yet even within academic circles, there is a lot of confusion about dark matter, with evidence and interpretation often conflated in misleading and unproductive ways …
This is how I stumbled into the field in the late 1990s. I was studying the dynamics of small satellite galaxies as they orbit our galaxy, the Milky Way. From observation, we expected that these satellite galaxies must contain a lot of dark matter, from 10 to 1,000 times as much as their visible, normal matter. During my calculations, I made a perplexing discovery. My simulations produced satellite galaxies that look much like the ones actually observed, but they contained no dark matter. It seemed that observers had made wrong assumptions about the way the stars move within the satellite galaxies; dark matter was not required to explain their structures.
Pavel Kroupa, “Has dogma derailed the scientific search for dark matter?” at Aeon
It’s a lot like Darwinian evolution except that, in this case, people are willing to talk about it.
See also: Are dark matter and dark energy scientific?
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Eric Holloway: The Turing test is unscientific
Eric Holloway points out that the assumption that the human mind can be reduced to a computer program has never really been tested:
This test for intelligence, the Turing Test, was invented by and named after the mid-twentieth century computer pioneer Alan Turing. It is a subjective test in that it depends on whether an artificial intelligence is capable of convincing human testers that it is a human. But fooling humans, while impressive, is not really the same thing as actually possessing human-level intelligence. In any event, some judges may be biased in favor of the AI passing the Turing test and may thus be easier to persuade than skeptical ones.
In 2014, an AI chatbot named Eugene Goostman passed one Turing test competition, organized by the UK’s Reading University.The chatbot was developed to give the impression of a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, so that errors and manipulation of conversation could be overlooked. Quantum physicist Scott Aaronson showed just how unconvincing this chatbot was in a short conversation.
Eric Holloway, “Current artificial intelligence research is unscientific” at Mind Matters News
See also: Math shows why the mind can’t be reduced to a formula. The Liar’s Paradox shows that even mathematics cannot be reduced to a fixed set of axioms. Gödel’s discovery brought back a sense of wonder to mathematics and to the rest of human knowledge. His incompleteness theorem underlies the fact that human investigation can never exhaust all that can be known. Every discovery builds a path to a new discovery.
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