Comments on: Sterile Neutrinos and the Problem of Evil

By: B. Farmer

B. Farmer — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:19:49 +0000

Of course why even bother with evolution if you want to make some humans and are truly omnipotent? You can’t escape the problem this way. Personally I think the omnipotent assumption is an unreasonable one even for a god .

By: A. Waldenburger

A. Waldenburger — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 19:06:27 +0000

I must be missing the point. The way you describe the process of dealing with neutrino oscillations is pretty much exactly the way Popper meant it to work: You have a theory, you find a counterexample, boom, theory dead, make up a new theory and repeat. Nobody avoided falsification. It happened at every step.

Falsification does not mean finding a fault and dropping the subject. It means finding a fault and then trying to get it right(er).

By: Byron@TRIUMF

Byron@TRIUMF — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:11:52 +0000

In response to the first post, I just note that the Duhem-Quine Thesis implies that no model is falsifiable. The point of post is to point out the avoiding falsification comes at a cost.

By: F. Kellner

F. Kellner — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 08:34:22 +0000

Leibniz was and still is totally right. Our senses and what the brain makes of it is very limited. The scope of human perception is a fraction of reality. It is constructed to find food in the wild and not to figure out the foundation of existence. Furthermore, evil is the bigger part of benevolence. Without it we hadn’t been evolved. Its the drive of evolution.

By: A. B. Carleial

A. B. Carleial — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 01:12:58 +0000

Just a feeling, a hunch. I am not a physicist. I think sterile neutrinos are a cop-out.

By: NW

NW — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 23:17:38 +0000

When Pauli first theorized the neutrino, he said “I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.” As it turns out, he was wrong. Not only have they been detected, but remarkable properties have been measured. They (neutrinos) are now capable of helping us understand the solar interior, rather than vice-versa. All these things in only 80 years – a lifetime, yes, but only a moment in the context of human history.

I mention this only because I think that what seem like untestable things can become testable in (relatively) short timescales. The people who have written papers on 2+ neutrinos to explain this I think consider them fully falsifiable with adequate further experiment, and those that I know at least only pursue studying them because they want to consider falsifiable models. (I have not myself written any.) Can one come up with a model which is completely impossible to test? Sure, but equating these efforts to those is unfair. If we are scientists, we should at least be aware of what kind of physics explains the existing data, and we should pursue it experimentally if we feasibly can.

While it may not be this year or next year that it’s tested, it’s unreasonable to equate results than will not occur in this funding cycle or the next to eternity. Well, perhaps in the current fiscal climate…