[withjive]

Yes that is a great of example of reading something on the internet and believing it completely?

You just linked me to a Stackoverflow post about a theory, which turns out to just be completely wrong, while managing to include a few valid facts.

Was a fun exercise, but please don't get your science this way.

[formerly_proven]

Of course a shadow can move faster than light. Because a shadow is not actually an object moving at all.

[knome]

The moon is a little more than 0.1 light seconds in diameter. Any wag that took more than a tenth of a second to traverse the moon's surface would be moving slower than the speed of light across it. There's no way the ponderous wag displayed in the video was moving so quick. At best, it was moving half the speed of light across it.

What would really be interesting of the things mentioned in the video linked from the stackoverflow question, would be how a perceiver would see the closing scissors occur.

If you were 12 light years from the handle end of the scissors, and only 2 light years from the tips, if the closing motion took a year to occur, you would see the point move backwards from the tip to the handles, since the light would take longer to reach you to see the handles close than the tips.

[drooby]

Hey dude, sorry our tiny brains are struggling with the science. Do you mind sharing a link to the actual science?

[d0mine]

Claiming that something is wrong without an alternative theory is not how science is done too

[fastball]

Not really true. You can definitely falsify someone else's hypothesis without positing one of your own.

This is more of how it should be done in business/politics – not very helpful to say "this is the wrong way to do it" but not propose a better solution. In science, however, falsify things is always useful.

[d0mine]

It is a common misconception. You can't falsify anything without your own theory. Some people just can't (at the conscious level) recognize their assumptions (if you don't see air, it doesn't mean there is none).

[fastball]

I don't think this is correct.

Hypotheses make predictions. Experimentation can test those predictions without providing an alternative explanation for the phenomena you are testing.

For example, if I came up with a theory of gravity that implied everything should fall towards the earth at the same speed, all you need to do to falsify my theory is show that this is not the case. You do not need to know that wind resistance is the confounding variable to know that the theory which suggests everything should fall at the same speed is wrong.

[d0mine]

Again, you can’t make an experiment without an underlying theory.

I understand some concepts are so ingrained, that they are perceived as theories but as reality itself (Newtonian physics before the end of XIX century) but physics is not constrained by our intuition (what we are familiar with).

[fastball]

Could you provide an example? Because I did so, and you repeating exactly what you said earlier doesn't really invalidate mine. As far as I can tell, my example is valid and invalidates your theory that you need a theory to falsify another theory.