Genuinely logical deductions carry equal or greater weight as experiments. Logical deduction is part of the process of scientific analysis. Logical deduction is in fact the glue that connects otherwise disconnected scientific theories. Without logical deduction, scientific theories would be disconnected semantic dust.

Without the rules of math and logic, you can't do scientific analysis. Experiments are the data, logic and math are the engine. Its logic that tells us if the Earth is spherical its not cubical. No one does experiments to prove the Earth is not every other possible shape. Its logic that tells us that if the Earth has one shape, it cannot have another. No experiments are necessary. No one has tried to experimentally confirm the Earth is not a dodecahedron, or a torus, because those are logical impossibilities.

You are probably confusing genuine deductive logic for what people sometimes call deductions but are actually inductions or "common sense." Those typically fail often. But they are not true logical deductions. "Holmesian deduction" is not generally real logical deduction. But when you say science uses experiments to support a conclusion, on what basis do you declare those experiments support anything? Why does seeing X support Y? Without logical deduction, you can't get from here to there. Experiments don't tell you that X supports Y, experiments generate the X. Logical deduction connects X to Y. It is in fact two logical deductions that underpin two of the foundations of Science. If an assertion always leads to X, and an experiment demonstrates that X is false, then the original assertion cannot be entirely true. That's the principle of falsification. Conversely, if an assertion predicts a set of circumstances S, and the set S is distinct from all other similar assertions, then if experiments confirm all the elements of S, the probability that the original assertion is true increases with the size of S. That's the principle of confirmation. Try and do Science without variations of those deductions.

Yes and no. Yes, its possible for neutrino oscillation to take a different flavor neutrino than expected and oscillate its type to become one you were expecting. But neutrino oscillation doesn't alter energy. As a practical matter, I don't believe there exists a particle interaction that generates large amounts of muon or tau neutrinos at coincidentally the same energy as the proton-proton generated electron neutrino.

Unlikely, because research has both confirmed the process of neutrino oscillation and allowed observers to account for the oscillation in neutrino measurements. Also, neutrino oscillation can only reduce the number of neutrinos you observe (relative to the amount you think you should), so neutrino oscillation cannot in any way erase a signal, it can only make a signal harder to detect. The problem with the neutrinos observed in the article in question is that they are the p-p neutrinos which have relatively low energy; about half as much as the next strongest neutrino type thought to come from solar fusion processes and significantly weaker than the neutrinos we were first observing when the solar neutrino deficit now attributable to neutrino oscillation was first discovered. That's what made them difficult to detect until recently.

But, again, neutrino oscillation can't nullify these results, because oscillation only makes neutrinos harder to detect (by changing their "flavor"). It doesn't create neutrino signals where none originally existed (at least not in this sense).

Science is not about proof in the mathematical sense. Science is about amassing confirmation. To say something doesn't prove a theory in Science is like saying something doesn't prove a poem. Scientific proof is about sufficient confirmation of a theory as to make it the most useful and reasonable explanation for a set of observations.

In the case of solar fusion, the basic *idea* that the Sun is powered by fusion processes is sufficiently well demonstrated that its essentially a scientific fact: its "proven" as far as Science is concerned. But the precise mechanisms for that fusion and the precise way those processes generate energy is not yet perfectly understood. Without some means of direct observation of the core, it would be difficult to be certain that of all the possible fusion paths the current best candidate is actually happening would be difficult to determine in indirect ways. Solar neutrino observations give a way to perform direct observations of processes happening in the core, and that direct observation can significantly strengthen our confidence in the specific processes that are thought to happen in the core.

Science is always refining what we know, and not just expanding what we know. We can know, to within the limits of scientific certainty, that fusion generates the heat at the Sun's core without knowing for certain the precise particle interactions that occur as part of that process. Its also important to note that fusion is just the parent process believed to function in the core, and there are several different kinds of fusion (different interactions) that can and probably do generate heat in the core, and other processes also contribute that are secondary to fusion. Its a complex process. For example, the standard proton-proton cycle contains steps that generate gamma rays from fusing hydrogen and deuterium, gamma rays from annihilating electrons and positrons, decomposition (fission) of beryllium into lithium, fusion of beryllium into boron, and lots of other secondary reactions. So observations that can confirm both the individual reactions and their rough relative frequency can confirm the specifics of the theory while no on seriously thinks they would challenge the overall theory of nuclear fusion powering the Sun.

Science allows for deductive facts to carry scientific weight. I have no idea why you would think it does not.

Science uses both deduction and induction, because while induction is not as absolutely rigorous as deduction, its not possible to deduce the entire cosmos from first principles. One of the axioms of Science is that the universe is not completely random and operates on the basis of rules that govern its behavior, and those rules can be discovered through observation. Universal gravitation is an induction, because there's no way to deduce that gravity operates in the same way everywhere. The presumption is that its highly unlikely that gravity operates the same way in every place we directly measure it, and also operates in a consistent way in every place we can indirectly measure it, but somehow operates differently in every place we just happened to not directly or indirectly observe it.

All logical deduction must start with fixed axioms, and depending on what physical scientific laws you consider strong enough to be axiomatic, you can deduce a lot which is considered scientifically rigorous. For example, when we observe photons striking a detector, we *deduce* they were emitted from somewhere along the path the photon struck the detector. You could argue that's just an induction; that we're only guessing because that's how we've observed photons to behave in the past, but at some point that's sophistry, because it rejects the notion that Scientific reasoning can contain any axioms. Without some reasonable starting point - like being able to trust observations at all - you can't do Science at all.

Also, I doubt there exists any significant number of people who were suddenly more confident the Earth is an oblate spheroid after the launch of Sputnik than before. Nor am I sure how the launch of Sputnik demonstrates the Earth is approximately spherical better than all other demonstrations of that fact prior to Sputnik. Sputnik did not itself observe the Earth, and observers of Sputnik did not get significantly more information from Sputnik in a scientific sense that other observations of Earth's curvature prior to that point.

I'm not convinced that even the "Drunk History" version would make a significant impact on politicians.

Its very difficult to completely remove the effect; even vibrations that don't seem particularly noteworthy or even noticeable by humans could be enough to throw a drive head a few dozen nanometers (and that's sometimes all it takes) in the wrong direction and reduce the read signal enough to cause a read/write retry. Chassis design can greatly help, but cannot always completely eliminate the problem. Drives that have a higher tolerance for those vibrations can still perform better even in properly dampened chassis.

I'm not 100% certain, but I believe the problem is that the hard drive head assembly moves as a single unit, which means all of the heads for all the platters must move in unison. But the precision required to move the heads to the precise spot on the tracks where the data is recorded is such that it would be too difficult to design the heads in such a way that when one was over its track, all of the others would be *guaranteed* to be over their tracks on their respective platters. To do this you'd need to have the heads each on their own arms with their own voice coils to keep them all on track simultaneously. But that would add enough cost to the drive, it would be cheaper to just buy two half-capacity drives and stripe them yourself.

Basically, I think its possible, but not economically logical to make hard drives in a way that would allow for this kind of in-box striping. That's what RAID is for.

Actually, multi-drive rotational vibration tolerance is a design feature whereby the drive is designed to be capable of withstanding and tolerating induced rotational vibrations from outside the drive. Enterprise drives are normally designed to minimize the vibrations they generate and induce into their surrounding chassis. But on top of that, being able to dampen vibrations induced from the outside and function optimally can significantly improve the performance of the drives. In enterprise environments where performance is important, disk drives can theoretically tolerate a lot of vibrations by simply temporarily ceasing reads and writes until their read/write heads get back into alignment. But those pauses force the drive to wait for at least a full rotation before they can try again to read the same blocks. If this happens frequently the performance of the drive can be significantly degraded even if the drive lifetime isn't impacted. Multi-drive RV tolerance is not just about surviving the vibrations, its also about being able to function optimally without having to degrade performance when in a (relatively) high vibration environment, as is often the case in large high-density drive enclosures.

Without this feature, you can sometimes find your 4000 IOPS spindle array delivering only 2000 IOPS at random times, and not know why.

Scientists discover something new, which suggests they were wrong before, which means they could be completely wrong about everything. Just like when scientists discovered a new species of butterfly, proving we still have no idea if life exists on Earth.

Only for the subject of global warming can scientists discover a potentially new way in which climate change could accelerate over time due to man induced warming of the deep oceans, and that is used as evidence that maybe its not happening at all.

I would also be perfectly happy with picking climatologists at random. The result would be about the same as picking physicists at random to decide whether gravity officially exists.

Certainly. But the question was whether automated testing should be considered sufficient. I think I would do my own flip-around. I think if Google wants to change the California law that requires road testing to make it so that simulation testing is sufficient, then I think Google should donate the simulator, and if an automated car passes the simulation but fails in the real world in a way real world testing would have uncovered but the simulator did not, Google should be held liable for all damages associated with that failure. Under that circumstance, I would be inclined to trust that Google's simulators are a sufficient match to reality to consider substituting simulation testing for road testing.

If Google doesn't want to subject itself to that criteria, then that's a tacit admission the simulation is not guaranteed to catch all the problems real world testing can catch, and I would consider their proposal to be invalid on its face.

For some definition of "real." Some pretty far-out definition.

You don't need to ask for permission to test your car with simulations. You only have to ask for permission to replace real world testing with simulations. Personally, I'm not fond of replacing real world testing completely with simulations. The problem is that the point of testing software is to make sure the programmers have properly dealt with as many possible real world situations, and to reduce the likelihood the programmers haven't ignored an unexpected circumstance. Simulations can only test for what the simulation programmers have accounted for. Its substituting the system programmers' judgment for the simulation programmers' judgment. Its useful, but in my opinion insufficient.

So if I steal a hundred million dollars, the absolute worst case punishment I could receive in Anonymous Coward-ville is a billion years of community service? That's a better risk/reward ratio than any business opportunity I've ever been presented with. I'm in.