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Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser write in the NYT that two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, recently published a controversial piece called "Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics" that criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today's most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are "sufficiently elegant and explanatory." Whether or not you agree with them, Ellis and Silk have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given physics its credibility:
Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts. These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.
Richard Dawid argues that physics, or at least parts of it, are about to enter an era of post-empirical science. "How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally?" ask Frank and Gleiser. "Are superstrings and the multiverse, painstakingly theorized by hundreds of brilliant scientists, anything more than modern-day epicycles?"
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @06:37PM
Venus did this. Temperatures are approximately the same at the same pressure regardless of what constitutes the atmosphere. They just call it a "coincidence" and dismiss it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @03:44AM
Its called "thermal equilibrium". Even if some areas of the atmosphere have lower concentrations of CO2 than others, they're still constantly moving towards thermal equilibrium with the areas where the CO2 concentrations are higher. The areas with higher concentrations will generally have a higher temperature than areas with lower, but its not like heat will stay neatly trapped only in those areas without transferring to other areas. In reality, heat moves from hotter areas to colder areas until both areas have the same temperature.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @10:19AM
I don't think that explains what I am talking about. Calculate the ratio of blackbody temps for Venus and Earth (due to intensity of sunlight) and then compare the real ratio of temperatures for the same pressures and they are very close.
Luckily, Venus has a very uniform temperature so we can see this from a few probes, e.g. Magellan:
http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html [blogspot.com]
It works for troposphere pressures (all tropopauses occur at around 200 mbar), so comparing to Mars doesn't work. I disagree with that link in that we can conclude "No greenhouse effect" from this. I think there is some kind of equilibrium being maintained but your explanation is not complete.