/sci/ - Science & Math

>>8025098
>summer biotech internship
>sharing lab space w/ a french masters student
>work involves lots of DNA recovery, go through lots of binding buffer
>right on the bottle in bright red ALLCAPS: do not mix with bleach

>french student comes over to sink, has a ~5L bucket half-full of used eppendorfs
>he's trying to wash out the fucking eppendorfs for recycling
>it's not even necessary
>he does it anyway
>starts pouring clorox into the bucket
>chlorine/HCN gas immediately begins to rise up in a dark yellow haze
>the fucker puts a foam lid on it, leaves it in the sink, and heads off to lunch
>I end up carrying the thing, lid mere centimeters from my face, down the hall to the fume hood
>explain to the baguette exactly what happened/why

>mfw he does it again a week later

>>7286907
Listen up, son.

The vast majority of grants for theoretical physics are going to groups involved in string theory. Now, string theory has some neat math behind it (I'll readily admit that I don't understand math at that level). But good math alone doesn't necessarily make for a good (i.e. testable) theory.

The problem with string theory (and by extension m-theory and superstring theory) is that it has been around for literally decades - more than enough time for someone somewhere to have come up with a falsifiable hypothesis that could be tested by experiment. But no one has.

Quoting Richard Feynman: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.'"

In fact, many theoretical physicists of today are of the opinion that they don't have to have experimental proof; that as long as the theory is "subtle and elegant" enough, then proof by experiment isn't necessary.

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/01/27/381809832/the-most-dangerous-ideas-in-science

This only ends up directing funding away from other promising theories, such as loop quantum gravity, for no other reason than "we've spent nearly half a century trying to make this work, so we must be on the right track!"

It's not even a science at this point. It might as well be theology.

>>6625129
>We're all just condensed energy.

This.

On a more philosophical note: what makes you think we're putting ourselves up on a pedestal? Because we're selfish? Because "hurr hurr that's how human scum roll?" Why does the great white shark put itself up on an oceanic pedestal?

Answer: it doesn't. It merely out-competes the rest of the hunters in the ocean.

I'm always amused by the people who try to shoehorn a structure of ethics into nature. Had chimpanzees out-competed us, do you believe that they'd think twice about experimenting upon us? It'd be anthropocentric to suggest otherwise.

>>6332145