[octothorp]

Originally Posted by Itse

You know, philosophically speaking, we don't know anything for sure. I'm not sure how to put it in a short and simple way (especially in a foreign language), but basicly it goes like this:

Take anything you think you know. Anything at all. For example, that when you drop something in your house it falls down. Or that you're not a frog next time you wake up. How do you know this? Because you've seen propably seen thousands of objects fall in your lifetime, and they've all come down. And because you've never been a frog as far as you know.

But actually, that's not knowing. That's an assumption. We drop something a million times, we see that every time it falls, and we assume that's the way things go. We make theories as to why that is, we notice that there's gravity, we build theories on why gravity exists and observe that yeah, good theory, things still go down and it all goes together with these other theories and we can observe those things happening too. But really, hypothetically, it could all be an extremely unlikely coincidence. Gravity could actually be suspect to extremely rare but wild fluctuations. All laws of nature could just turn inside out one day, and the reason could be so simple any physicist could tell why things happened given more time than the millisecond it took for him to vaporize.

Maybe next time you drop something it goes up. Maybe some day we'll all learn that there's a power in the universe that can seemingly randomly turn people into frogs, we just haven't noticed it before because it's never been recorded. Maybe next time it hits you. Maybe some day God shows up and goes "Wazaa dudes! See what I did with there, that frog thing? Funny ain't it? You know Saturns ring is so cool, I could watch it for millenniums. So what have you guys been doing the last two thousand years? Is Halo 3 out yet? I planned it to be the the pinnacle of human civilization you know, so it's all downhill from there." There really is no way of knowing.

What we do know, there's no point in sweating over this stuff, as it really isn't very likely.

Right, Cartesian Doubt. But are you saying that this doubt should prevent us from bothering with scientific research such as the LHC, or are you suggesting that is should prevent us from caring about the remote possibility that the LHC might turn the planet into a smoldering little mass of strange matter?