JB Froke wrote:
"Science is the study of how nature works. Truth about the constitution and relationships of nature's elements is its goal; but this is a goal that is not reachable, except in the minds of the absurdly arrogant. Without disparate views and intellectual challenge, the study and its progress towards its goal (at best an asymptotic endeavor) would shrivel on the vine."
To which Forbes Bagatelle-Black replied:
Before we go poo-pooing all that there science stuff, let's recognize that there are certain questions to which I've not seen definitive, scientific answers over the course of our current debate.
It's funny, my take was that JB's comments didn't involve any poo-pooing. He's making good point, I think, and one that I could never have made so well. He's seems to be saying that science is all well and good (and in fact it's all we have) but we need to be aware that science is limited in it's ability to reveal the underlying realities of nature. Taken to the limit, it is actually a matter of accepted scientific fact that science can't predict everything. There was a time, not so long ago, that people believed that knowing the position and momentum of everything at a given time would allow you, in theory, to predict everything that would happen down the road. Then we realized that mechanics in the macroscopic realm is nothing like quatum mechanics, and early in the last century everything changed. Most of us still haven't caught up, certainly not myself.
As for poo-pooing, I suppose that in some sense this is the essence of science. What other way of looking at the universe requires an ongoing effort to undermine it's own conclusions? There is no faith involved, in fact just the opposite. If you're trying to prove that some conclusion is wrong, you're just doing your job.
What's all this got to do with bikes? Well, it gets back to my point that the frame-flex experiment that I referered to earlier just leaps to some unfounded conclusions and does not seem to reflect the least bit of scepticism. I guess they left that for peer review (us). Futhermore, and I think JB will agree, the complexity of the system under study is pretty much ignored. I'm all for simplifying assumptions, but this is crazy. We need to give more credit to the 110 years of safety bike development here. If a design is optimized over this long of a period, either by trial and error, by a more rigid approach, or in this case both, you are not going to resolve the differences in the various "end" products with a crude experiment and a search for order-of-magnitude variances in data. Perhaps if the experimenter had used an iron-tired, wooden-wheeled boneshaker, and a fully-suspended DH bike, he would have found the variances that he appears to have been looking for. Differences in bikes in an extremely narrow performance range (modern road racing bikes) are going to be small and they may not be in the parameters we choose to measure. But if these differences aren't real we need to assume that we're all just delusional (which is partly true), and Reynolds is just snowing us when they offer all those different tube alloys, diameters, and gauges. Personally, I think we should give ourselves, the machines, and their creators more credit. Certainly more credit than we should give a Science Fair project.
Tom Dalton
Bethlehem, PA
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