Lokasenna
Posts: 9297
Joined: 3/3/2012 From: Iowan in MD/DC Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: witpqs quote:
ORIGINAL: Lokasenna quote:
ORIGINAL: JohnDillworth quote:
Yes, that is one hypothesis. Well gravity is still a theory too but but most modern scholarship points firmly at Kansas, and then it jumped to Fort Riley, and spread through other over crowded Army bases, boarded a ship with the troops and landed in Breast France, infected thousands there, went quite in the summer, mutated (they have a solid genetic chain of evidence, much of it cited in the footnotes of the article you posted including the accepted best book on the subject and the meticulously referenced and researched The Great Influenza by John Barry), came back in a more deadly, mutated strain, brought 4 great armies to their knees, halted the 1918 German offensive, came back across the Atlantic and killed tens of thousands in Army bases and millions in cities and traveled around the world, again, killing millions more. It's not hard to trace these things over time. Heck, scholars have used written records to track the progress of great plagues since Roman times. Just want to note that "theory" in science is not the same as "theory" in colloquial language. In science, it means a model that is proven and encompasses all the evidence and principles therein. In conversation, it means simply a hypothesis. I wasn't aware of the research you mention - I'll have to dig into that sometime... sometime. PS - Breast France sounds like a swell place. Isn't it more like "not falsified", "consistent with the evidence"? In other words, no examples which contradict the theory have been identified? Really, what would happen is that evidence that wasn't supported by the model would cause the model to be updated and changed to incorporate that new evidence. AFAIK, the theory of gravity (and general relativity in general) is pretty complete these days except that we don't know how to unify it with quantum mechanics. When somebody says that we're still searching for a "theory of everything", that unification is what they're referring to. String theory is one of these, however (other than the math part) this is still basically entirely a hypothesis and not a theory.
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