#science rant

If you don't publish the experiments that didn't yield interesting results, people are going to waste time repeating them because when they look in the database and see nothing published on them, they're going to assume the experiment hasn't been done???

And then my professor told me that scientists just "assume that if the experiment would be relatively easy to set up, but there's nothing published on it, that means someone has already done it with no significant results." WHAT? That means we could be assuming that important experiments have been done just because they seem to be too easy???

Not to mention that this also encourages people to fudge results towards significance for career advancement because no one wants to spend YEARS on a project they don't get any credit for.

but then you see grace on space, analysing samples. using eppendorf tubes (although he doesn't balance them properly in the centrifuge which is funny considering the importance of the centrifuge force on the ship lol). and he uses micropipettes like. my everyday most used instrument is shown in a movie, and ryan gosling is the actor using them like woahhhh.

and as so many scifi movies it starts with the soon to happen destruction of the earth and all of that. but suddenly the movie is a love letter to life itself????? which i didn't expect at all????? quoting grace, "life is reason star not die." life as we know it, life as bacterias amoebas, protozoa, are saving us even from the death of our sun but some alien microorganism. the very same diversity and lifeforms we humans are daily destroying with our stupid way of living.

and ultimately the movie is a love letter to friendship, which is so refreshing nowadays. ryland finds his purpose, his reason to live, to die for, by making an alien friend. THAT IS SO HUGE. platonic love do deserve this kind of recognition. at the end of the day we are social animals who need friends and partners (not necessarily romantic thou) to share our life with, even if we are in our planet earth or among the stars. someone who listens, who asks, who's there for us, who wants to be a part of our lives, even when it makes them sacrifice years of their life only to help us, even when they won't even see the result, but will be glad that we made it back thanks to them. DO YOU EVEN START TO REALISE HOW MUCH LOVE THERE IS BETWEEN THIS CHARACTERS???? and it's portrayed so easily, so simple, cause it's just like breathing. it just is.

I cannot get over this bro telling me that ram air isn't why things burn up on re-entry, and then trying to bullshit some pseudoscience physics about how the vibration of the atoms rubbing on the object plus the atoms sliding across it's surface is what causes it.

So, first of we have the problem of articles/studies that prove the hypothesis or make Great Big Impacts are the main ones published- and therefore, we have lower access to A) important works that disprove popular theory and B) works with important impacts that are less obvious. (The bias in publishing is...really bothersome)

The statement above may seem obvious; those are in fact two different things, duh. But, that doesn't mean people always treat it that way.

We throw around the word "theory" a lot. From reading conspiracy theories to saying "well that's my theory" after guessing why the teacher is wearing fur on her hands. The way we use the word "theory" in everyday life isn't always very accurate. This can become an issue when we're talking about science. Now, I'm not saying we should start saying "conspiracy hypothesis", I often use the word "theory" casually as well. But we do need to make sure that people know what a theory actually is.

This is the definition for a scientific theory from dictionary.com:

"noun

a coherent group of propositions formulated to explain a group of facts or phenomena in the natural world and repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation."

So, what's the problem? Well, for the people who don't know what a theory actually is, given how we talk about them it might seem like just an idea of what could be true. Or something that hasn't been proven. And that's not true. But this might lead to the conclusion: theory = guess.

You see, a theory is what is considered true. It's the highest tier of scientific relevancy. There is nothing higher than a theory, because a theory is what should be viewed as fact, it's the closest we can get to the objective reality. In order for something to be called a "theory" you have to have evidence, and usually a lot of it, that's why the definition mentions "repreatedly confirmed", because one study is not enough to create a proper theory. And if there is evidence that disproves it, then it's out the window.

People who don’t understand quantum mechanics (or any principles of physical chemistry for that matter) making Schrödinger's cat analogies...

I know almost nobody will see this, but this is what happens when I watch How the Universe Works at midnight.

The New Horizons probe in 2015 discovered these kinds of volcanoes on Pluto called cryo-volcanoes. Basically, instead of magma being brought up to the surface, it’s SLUSH. Like, partially-frozen water. It freezes immediately, of course, but still.