[alancalverd]

They've invented more particles than real Chemical elements.  How can that make sense?

Absolutely.

Earth, air, fire and water. "Chemistry" is just mumbo jumbo.

Physiology my arse. Just balance the phlegm and choler and all will be well.

The sun goes round the flat earth and everything else is fixed in a blue sphere. Simples.

[Bored chemist]

They've invented more particles than real Chemical elements.  How can that make sense?

In the same way that there are more bricks than houses.

But bricks are all the same.  Whereas to follow your analogy,  the builders of a house would be confronted by all kinds of different bricks. Which would confuse them so much, that they couldn't actually construct anything.
 
Isn't that the state modern Physicists find themselves in?

A better analogy might be "there are more  items for sale in a builder's yard, than houses".

[Kryptid]

They've invented more particles than real Chemical elements.  How can that make sense?

There are millions of chemical compounds known. Is that evidence that chemistry doesn't make sense?

[Brandonres]

Does anyone use the forum these days, quite strange at one time we had quite a few posts but these days they are very few.
73s G0FEX Ken

[charles1948 (OP)]

Does anyone use the forum these days, quite strange at one time we had quite a few posts but these days they are very few.
73s G0FEX Ken

Your post resonates with me Ken.  As a relative newcomer to this forum, I've struck by the paucity of posts on it. 
 
So many posts are only from the people running the site.  Not much input from outside.  Do you think that's because the day of the dedicated scientific forum is over.  Replaced by Twitter and Facebook?


 

[charles1948 (OP)]

They've invented more particles than real Chemical elements.  How can that make sense?

Absolutely.

Earth, air, fire and water. "Chemistry" is just mumbo jumbo.

Physiology my arse. Just balance the phlegm and choler and all will be well.

The sun goes round the flat earth and everything else is fixed in a blue sphere. Simples.

I empathise with your despair.  But does modern physics offer any more sense than "Earth, air, fire and water"
At least these were elements that you could see, and experience.

Whereas modern physics proposes invisible, intangible, "quarks".  Which apparently come in different "flavours" and "colours" which can be experienced by no-one.  Except with the eye of faith, interpreting meter-readings from the LHC.

I fear that modern physics is descending into a mysticism akin to the worst excesses of ancient astronomy,  where everything in the sky had to be explained by perfect circular movements at constant speed.

[Kryptid]

Arguing that something doesn't exist because you can't see it or experience it is fallacious reasoning. Scientists have become far more clever than that at finding evidence.

[charles1948 (OP)]

Arguing that something doesn't exist because you can't see it or experience it is fallacious reasoning. Scientists have become far more clever than that at finding evidence.

Aren't they increasingly relying for their "evidence" on meter-readings.  From ridiculous contraptions such as the LHC.
What has that got to do with reality?

[Kryptid]

Aren't they increasingly relying for their "evidence" on meter-readings.

So what? It sounds like you are arguing that meters are a poor way to record something. If you get pulled over by the police for speeding, are you going to argue that his radar gun is an invalid way of determining your speed because it's just a "meter reading"? Would you willingly walk through an area that had an extreme reading on a Geiger counter? It's just a meter reading, after all. Meter readings have nothing to do with reality. You'd be perfectly safe, right?

From ridiculous contraptions such as the LHC.

So you know more about the Large Hadron Collider than the people who work on it, eh?

What has that got to do with reality?

Everything.

Do you ever plan on using an argument that doesn't rely on your incredulity or lack of understanding?

[alancalverd]

I think Charles lives in a world where you are insulated from electricity bills and hard surfaces.

[evan_au]

Aren't (scientists) increasingly relying for their "evidence" on meter-readings?

We have realized over several centuries that there is more going on in the universe than our senses revealed.
- The telescope which revealed moons around Jupiter
- Infra-red radiation, off the red end of the spectrum - and now we use it to change channels on our TV sets
- The microscope which revealed a world of microscopic life, including our own cells and disease organisms
- Electricity, which now does a lot of our housework
- Ultraviolet, off the blue end of the spectrum - and now we know to put on sunscreen to avoid sunburn.
- Radio waves that brought news from around the world, or allow us to fix our position via GPS, or take pictures of a tumor in 3D, assisting cancer treatment
- X-Rays that can improve treatment of a broken bone.
- Seismic waves that travel through the Earth from distant earthquakes
- As well as radioactivity that can blacken a photographic plate (and now generates some of our electricity),
- Cosmic rays that travel through our atmosphere
- Neutrinos that can travel through the thickness of the Earth without hitting anything
- Gravitational waves from distant black hole collisions.

You could call all of these things "sounds", "images", "sensations" or "meter-readings", etc.
- The common thing is that these instruments improve the sensitivity of our natural senses by many orders of magnitude.

This guy was really living in a sensory-deprived world:

Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not

It seems that you want to live there, too (with a life expectancy half of what we can expect today...)
- You would be more likely to end up as the slave who does the menial tasks around the house, rather than the philosopher remembered millennia later!