Archive for March 22nd, 2002

The Big Questions: Why Nature ? Why Life ? Why Humanity ?

Friday, March 22nd, 2002

Science has no answer to the the questions of who or why universe. Science has made no attempt to define or describe the source of Universe. Science seeks rather to understand how the universe works — to understand the mechanism that the source uses to create Heaven and Earth — to create Life and Human — to create the Universe itself. … Is Dawkins right in his belief that it is a vacuous existential question to ask why? Is he right when he says, “Before Darwin, even educated people who had abandoned Why questions for rocks, streams and eclipses still implicitly accepted the legitimacy of the Why question where living creatures were concerned. Now only the scientifically illiterate do. But only conceals the unpalatable truth that we are still talking about an absolute majority?” … Is Dawkins right that there is no big purpose? That nature, universe, life, and humanity have no purpose?  (03/22/02)  
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Lynch Challenges, Campbell Responds

Friday, March 22nd, 2002

Lynch: “Campbell began by talking about total oil and later switched to ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’. The problems are a) the distinction is mostly arbitrary and has no meaning for the market (oil is oil); b) production data allowing you to break them out is almost completely unavailable; c) he seems to actually be changing his definition of the two, making it impossible to judge the accuracy of his forecasts. If you don’t know what total oil production is going to be, how can you talk about the market impact? ” Campbell: “It is absolutely true that the definitions of what to measure have evolved as this study has progressed. In the early days when working with public data I took a very generalist view of the matter and, as Mr Lynch sometimes likes to point out, got quite a few things wrong. No doubt I will continue to do so although hopefully also making progress. The first step in the analysis I have tried to make was to determine the endowment of oil and gas in Nature. It soon became evident that different types of oil depleted in different ways – obviously a tar sand is different from a Middle East flowing well. Furthermore, knowledge of some types is better than for others. The terms Conventional and Non-conventional have no fixed definition, but nevertheless are widely used to roughly distinguish the easy from the difficult. Perhaps mistakenly, I used these terms in a particular sense which I defined very clearly so that everyone could understand the meaning attached to them.”  (03/22/03)
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