Ugh... I am sorry to say, but this article was rather bad from a science perspective.
It sometimes seems as though science is nothing more than an elaborate guessing game. Studies and research don't prove anything, they merely make near approximations, hailed as the newest brick atop a foundation that will always be pretty shaky
Yes, science is a guessing game. What happens is that someone makes an observation, or continues from something that is hitherto known, and makes
a model and a theory. What then happens is that you
test the model. From this you get a
proof that the theory and the model works and predicts what will happen in reality, even when you apply them to something new.
But the scientific community seldom "hails" this as something revolutionary (this is the media's domain). Instead science tends to be almost rediculously cautious in their conclusions, which unfortunately has led to some modern myths not being nipped in the bud, such as claims of electromagnetic hypersensitivity or the claim that cell phones give cancer, claims that have substantially lowered thousands of people's quality of life by causing unncessary fears.
Nor is the foundation shaky. The models that make up the foundation are robust. They must be, or your science is fundamentally flawed. Because here is the catch:
even in the advent of new refined science, your old science must still hold up. Science is backwards compatible, or it's not science. Even in the advent of new science, the old science must give the same result, for the same kind of tests, or you have failed.
The caveat "for the same kind of tests" is because new refined measuring can discover that your previous model was indeed wrong. But... your science is still good
if you made it as good as you could with the means you had available at the time.
That was for instance the case of the apparent lack of parallax motion of stars on the celestial sphere which made the theory about all stars being fixed on a sphere at near infinat distance stick around a little longer.
Imagine if every discovery in science was treated as an irrefutable truth. We'd still think the Earth was flat, that we were the center planet in the Universe and that the laws of classical physics applied to everything, even subatomic particles.
Two flaws here. First: it was never scientists that claimed the Earth was flat (a notion that was invalidated over 2000 years ago by the way), nor that the Earth was the center of the universe. The geocentric view was a
religious notion and it was science that busted this open because the observations in correlation to the "model" that the Earth was the center of the solar system could not be made to match up without some truly convoluted explanations. It was science that said "Sorry... but it makes alot more sense if we model it as the sun as being the center" (for which the church got mighty upset because with that statement, their model got kicked in the crotch).
And second,
no scientific discovery is ever treated as "irrefutable truth", because we are still dealing with
models and theories. A model is not reality... its a facimilie of reality. A theory is not reality... it's a guess of how reality will behave. Telling it "how it is, end of story", that's religion's domain.
Science instead says "My model, up until now, and as far as we can make out, works in the same way that we have oberved reality to work". That is hardly calling it "irrefutable truth".
In fact, it is a
requirement that a scientific claim is refutable, because otherwise it is not science. Without so called falsability, you can't make a scientific claim becuase then you can't test your result. This is why religion is not science because you cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that something does not exist, which means the claim are untestable.
Then as far as the four "mysteries" in question go:
Placebo/Nocebo: It is well documented that the recipient's attitude clearly affects the measured result. But saying that this is a big mystery is taking it too far.
Martian Methane: Come one... we havn't even been there yet! There could be thousands of explanations. But before we got there and can test it for real we cannot investigate the matter. This is not a matter of mystery or bafflement. We are just
prevented from better investigation at the moment.
Dark Matter/Dark Flow: We know very well what "Dark " is... it's a model for a phenonema that we have not been able to find any other theory for so far. Dark is not reality, it's a model. What the real world equivalent that Dark is temping for however... that is indeed a mystery. but again it's a matter of us not being able to go out there and check up on.
Out of body experiences:
They are even able to describe exactly what happened to them during the time their heart was stopped. Nuh-uh! Hold the phone here. Without going into detail, let's just say that this matter is still a hot debate as to whether this phenonema is even happening the way it is being portrayed. Science - to the best of my knowledge - does not yet recognize OOBE to the detail you are writing.
My personal list of the top three scientific mysteries would be these:
1) Conciouness and self-awareness. What causes it? How is it that I can think; that I can be aware that I am thinking and think about myself thinking? Will other species, as evolution progresses, evolve the same kind of self-awareness? Are they perhaps even already there?
2) Gravity (or pretty much any of the four fundamantal forces): what causes it? The models are few and pretty vague so far.
3) Time's arrow... what causes it? Why is our perception of time unidirectional? Why can we not willingly move back and forth in time?
/S
