h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you want an argument, don't look to me for it.

I asked an honest question in a forum designed for this.

Answers are being given. Arnie's last post for example.

You saying that 'your question is wrong', or 'other people are satisfied so you should be too' is not helpful in the slightest.

I don't want an argument, or really, a debate. Just an answer. You're posts suggest you're not intrested in giving one. So why respond? Especially in such an aggressive manner.

I'd appreciate it if you refrained from responding to my posts, unless you have something you believe to be genuinely helpful to say.

I genuinely hope we can meet/ debate/ discuss amicably and productively in the future.

Thanks

blub-blub

I'm sorry for replying to your comments about strong and weak forces, and gravity being constant in the way I did.
Maybe I should have just asked what point you were actually trying to make. I'm still pretty confused about that.

Likewise your later comments about 'the masses and accelerations of what?'. It's strange to me that someone who understands *anything* about things as esoteric as strong and weak forces wouldn't naturally know what people were talking about when discussing masses and forces in the context of gravity.

Actually, I didn't say 'your question is wrong', but 'your question is a bit of an odd one to ask', which is what it seemed like.
Likewise, the comments about what people who understand the subject accept were relevant to some extent in the context of 'proof beyond reasonable doubt', since it is the people who actually understand the topic who are best placed to define 'reasonable', but were a too forceful for SEx.

I had made assumptions about your knowledge from your reference to gravitions, which is why I would have thought you might understand *why* I though your question was odd.
It's tricky gauging someone's knowledge sometimes, especially these days, when the internet and popular science books have made it harder to think 'They know about *that*, so they must understand *this*' with a reasonable amount of confidence.


Faced with a reasonable explanation, reasonable doubt does require *some* kind of alternative explanation, not just the presence of some amorphous nonspecific uncertainty. Thinking in a legal context, if a reasonable prosecution case is put forward but no-one could imagine a plausible defence, a conviction is likely whether someone is actually guilty or not.

In practice, the experimental demostration of gravitons isn't likely to make many scientists have an increased confidence in gravity, nor to shed any light on the issue of the symmetry of the gravitational forces between massive and relatively small objects.