10,000 year old calendar found in Scotland:

Originally posted by dryhump
I don't mean to hijack the thread, but I do have a question related to your post. Is there no room for amateurs in science anymore? I don't necessarily mean this guy, but honest amateurs who are interested in things like this to investigate and pose theories.

Supernovae are regularly spotted by amateurs before the professionals see them, basically because there's so many amateur astronomers one will be looking in the right direction at the right time. There's plenty of scope for amateurs in science and archaeology, but the thing about professionals is that there is quality control.

Originally posted by dryhump
Is there no room for amateurs in science anymore? I don't necessarily mean this guy, but honest amateurs who are interested in things like this to investigate and pose theories.

Actually I have no problem with this guy discovering the formation, studying it and posing his theories. But I will take his theories with a pinch of salt until people with more experience in the field recognise that he is on to something and independently verify any key findings. If they do that, then he should get full credit for his findings.
But until there is independent verification, he remains an amateur with rather outlandish theories.

Originally posted by dryhump
I don't mean to hijack the thread, but I do have a question related to your post. Is there no room for amateurs in science anymore? I don't necessarily mean this guy, but honest amateurs who are interested in things like this to investigate and pose theories.

You are far from hijacking this thread! You are welcome to post any question here! I have some ex inlaws who live on Staten Island and they are amateur archaeologists and look for 18th century artifacts and have found hundreds of samples there and they actually send out stuff to be carbon dated and such.

If you do your work like they do, not just build theories ad hoc like this guy does, then your work has a lot more credibility to the pro's who are more likely to come look at your work than just some crackpot just announcing ancient aliens built the pyramids or some such.

There is a philosopher of science named Karl Popper who made some advances in the area of scientific work, his falsify rule, that is to say, it can be called scientific if and only if some work can be theoretically falsifiable.

Like this dude just saying he found alignments that show the structure to be 100,000 years old is not falsifiable so it is not science.

For instance, non-falsifiable claims for supernatural events, presence of god, or supernatural healing are not falsifiable and thus will forever remain outside the realm of science.

So their 100,000 year date claim is not falsifiable because we lack any means of confidently dating the rocks and such.

If there were carvings into the rock, we can get a sense of the age of the carving by the amount of wear showing but we see no carving there.