One of the reasons I love science so much is that it gives you the tools to find answers to questions. Asking good questions is one of the most important skills a scientist will learn. A scientific question is one that can be investigated; one that has the possibility of being answered. A question that cannot be answered is not a good question. You could stump someone by asking, “What is the colour of happiness?” or “Why do fairies smell of cinnamon?” This is no way to win a debate. Sometimes, during arguments, someone will ask a question in the mistaken belief that it cannot be answered. It can be quite entertaining when someone does this on TV.
Bill O’Reilly is an American TV news commentator/presenter who adopts a somewhat strident approach to the news in order to entertain his audience. In this clip he is attacking David Silverman, who has just provocatively asserted that all religions are a scam. Rather than address Mr Silverman’s comment directly, Bill asks him a question that he thinks nobody can answer.
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It turns out, much to Mr O’Reilly’s surprise, that the behaviour of the tides has been studied by science. By careful observation, asking questions and testing possible answers, it has been determined that the regular rising and falling of the Earth’s oceans is caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon (and the Sun to a lesser extent) in combination with the rotation of the Earth about its axis. It is not an unanswerable question. In fact it is something that most 12 yr olds would be able to answer.
In one of Mr O’Reilly’s regular on-line videos responding to viewers’ letters, he takes on the many people who wrote in to point out that we know why the ‘tide goes in, tide goes out, never a miscommunication’. He was not happy at people poking fun at him so, in his discomfort, he fired out some more questions in response.
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There seem to be four main questions.
1. How did the Moon get there?
There are several possible explanations but the most complete one describes a collision that occurred about 4.5 billion years ago as the Solar System was still forming. Two developing planets collided forming two bundles of rocky stuff. The larger mass became the Earth and the smaller mass was captured in the Earth’s gravitational field to form the Moon. Samples of the moon analysed in the last few years help support this ‘giant impact’ hypothesis.
2. How did the Sun get there?
The Sun is roughly 4.6 billion years old and formed when a huge cloud of material (mostly hydrogen) collapsed in upon itself as a result of gravity. Most of this matter formed the Sun, but a disc of material condensed to form the other parts of the Solar System. The origin of this initial cloud is not known absolutely, of course, but we can see other stars forming in nebulae deep in space so we know that this is how it happens elsewhere. The original stuff of our star and planet probably came from one or more older stars that had come to the end of their life and exploded as a supernova. This is the process that produces the huge range of elements that we find on Earth.
3. (pt i) How come we have that (a moon, presumably) but Mars does not?
Mars has two moons, Phobos & Deimos. They are not as spherical as our moon so they are probably captured asteroids
(3. pt ii) How come Venus doesn’t have a moon?
He’s got me here. Venus and Mercury do not have moons (as far as we know) but all the other planets do – Jupiter has 67 of them!
4. Where did the first amoeba come from?
Well this is a big question, and not one to which anybody has an absolute answer. However, since we know that there is life on Earth we can make some educated guesses about the sort of processes that must have been necessary to produce it. In the swirling water of the early Earth (about 3.7 billion years ago) reactions may have occurred to produce simple amino acids and other organic molecules. Similar conditions have been produced in the laboratory and organic molecules have formed in a matter of weeks. The early oceans could have been like vast, uncontrolled laboratories with trillions of reactions happening every second. Somewhere in this broiling mass a simple, self-replicating molecule may have formed – possibly similar to the RNA that viruses contain. At some point this early precursor to DNA became trapped inside a thin, fatty bubble (cell membrane) and the first cell appeared. When these cells became able to harness sunlight to produce food and release oxygen, the atmosphere changed allowing different organisms to develop. These early bacteria-like cells increased in complexity, combining to form more sophisticated organisms like amoeba. The first fossil evidence of amoeba-like, single-celled animals is about 1.8 billion years old.
Science does not deal in absolute certainty but in fitting the observable evidence and experimental results to the best possible explanation; one that is consistent with all of the known facts. As the information changes so does the explanation.
It is important to fit the explanation to the facts rather than to start with an explanation and then try to find some facts that support it. In the next clip, Senator Brandon Smith is commenting on the issue of climate change at a committee hearing in 2014.
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“As you (Energy & Environment Cabinet official) sit there in your chair with your data, we sit up here in ours with our data and our constituents and stuff behind us. I don’t want to get into the debate about climate change, but I will simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There are no factories on Mars that I’m aware of.”
I am reminded of the phrase, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Wherever the Senator sits, the data should be the same, and the support of his constituents should not alter that data.
Many people have been kind enough to dispute the claim that the temperature on Mars is the same as it is on Earth. From Universe Today, the temperature range experienced on Earth is from 70.7 °C (Lut Desert, Iran) to -89.2 °C (Vostok, Antarctica) with an average global temperature of 15 °C. Mars has a tilted axis, like Earth, so experiences seasons with a high of 35 °C (at the equator, during summer) and a low of -143 °C (at the poles in winter). On average, the temperature on Mars is -63 °C.
I sometimes hear people saying, “Science can’t answer everything,” but I tend to take the view that any question that can be answered can only be properly answered by applying the scientific method. If a philosophical question is capable of being answered then it will be observation, testing and review that is likely to produce the most reliable answer. I would be fascinated to hear your view on that.
Questions…
- How many planets are there in the Solar System?
- Roughly how old is the observable Universe?
- What is the difference between an asteroid, a meteor and a meteorite?
- Despite being further from the Sun, Venus has a higher average surface temperature (462 °C) than Mercury (67 °C). Why is this?
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