will science one day solve everything

In this blog assignment, we ask ourselves if science will one day solve everything. Will we one day have a theory that explains everything? What is there left to discover that could change our current Darwin/Newton paradigm?

My answer in this case is really brief: WHO KNOWS? and who cares anyway? it's not like i'll be alive the day that this would eventually happen...

what makes pseudo-science pseudo?

In this blog, explain what the differences are between pseudo-sciences and hard sciences by analyzing a few. You can explore the differences between astronomy and astrology, crystology and geology, feng shui and...(whatever).

The main difference between science and pseudo-science is that scientific hypotheses are testable, whereas pseudo-scientific ones are not. There are 2 reasons for which pseudo-scientific hypothesis can't be tested:

1- vagueness: if a statement is vague enough it'simpossible to be proven right or wrong. A scientific statement is instead more precise, it uses words which meanings are defined and it usually gives a reference to a certain period of time.

2 - Ad hoc exceptions: it is an exception made especially for the case you want to prove. A good scientifc hypothesis is one that is general in nature and does not keep making exceptions, but it tries to improve and learn from the mistakes.

If you take astronomy and astrology you can see that astronomy is a rational and careful study of the stars and their movements; you have to deal with mathematics, with the law of physics, and struggle with your perception and you'll never be 100% sure, however if you design an experiment, other people will be able to understand your studies and eventually disprove your theory and predictions. ON THE OTHER HAND, astrology is just a bunch of people giving random meanings to the planets and their movements and pretending to apply these meanings to your personal life; in order to do so, they are extremely vague and so there is no way to prove them right or wrong because their predictions are evaluated on a very personal level and therefore not really scientific because there are no laws that says, for example, that lions are bossy.

Are mathematicians smarter than us?

The blog assignment of the week asks us if mathematical insight translates into smarts. Why is it that Mathematicians are seen as hyper-intelligent? Here you should take the formalist approach to mathematics into account, where 2+2=4 is only another way of saying (1+1)+(1+1)=(1+1+1+1). Here we are only unpacking numbers, which is doable if your short term memory is really good. Do mathematicians simply have a better short term memory than the rest of us?

I think that the correlation between short term memory and mathematicians is not correct. Maths is not about memorising stuff. Mathematics is about understanding concepts and being able to apply them to different situations. This gives a mathematician a certain kind of "mental elasticity" that allows him/her to being able to immediatly detect a method to solve a problem. I guess it is for this reason that mathematicians are seen as "hyper-intelligent".
It could be that "all mathematicians are intelligent"because they train their brain with calculations and finding solutions to problems, but it's not that if you don't have mathematical insight you're stupid. Maths is not the only discipline in which you have to look at deeper meaning or methods: reading and understanding a poem is also something challenging for the brain, maybe even more than maths, where there are no deeper meaning and most of the things are on the surface.
In conclusion, I think that mathematical insight can be seen as a sign of intelligence, but it's not the only characteristic a so-called ïntelligent"person should have.