Yes, I have. I visited a crew recording through the streets of the old town of Groningen in The Netherlands. It drew a fair bit of attention from the locals!
(Years later unfortunately the locals were hit by a different type of tremors: earthquakes caused by too much depletion of the gas field below. Because of this the field will be shut in now by 2022, quite a bit sooner than was expected back then in the 1980’s. We failed to predict the extent of the instability).
We just don’t hear the sound down at those frequencies because our ears are not sensitive enough.
But, is feeling the vibrations at such low frequencies any less real than hearing them? Isn’t hearing fundamentally a feeling sensation anyway? Just like our fingers feel the molecules of a table top, our ears feel the moving molecules of the air. We just call it something different.
There are more steps between what the instruments observe and what the human observes in seismic than in telescoping, but I don’t think they are inferential. What happens is that the raw data gets transformed from one domain into another using mechanical and mathematical manipulation, but is that extra layers of inference? Is it inference when a written book gets read aloud and recorded into an audiobook?
I think it is all just data, whichever way it is handled, and the real inference from data to model happens in the mind - after all the manipulation, not during. If there is an essential difference between seeing with the naked eye and looking through a telescope, what exactly is it?
First, that’s an argument from (unnamed) authority.
Second, even if evolutionary theorist do say that, it’s likely that what they mean by ‘macroevolution’ (evolution at/above the species level) is not what you mean by ‘macroevolution’ (primitive life forms to mammals). It’s possible that he additional processes they are speaking of are small-scale observable processes that have no more bearing on the issue you’re raising than do microevolutionary processes.
Third, even if those evolutionary theorists do propose large-scale change mechanisms - “other things going on” - Intelligent Design isn’t going to be one of them.
So that’s three obvious holes in your ‘argument’. Nor are you unintelligent enough to realise it, so the only reason you could possibly have for peddling these fallacies is that you haven’t anything better.
In what sense have we seen photons? We do not see an oscillating electromagnetic field at a given frequency, we experience red. How different are our senses, which are basically biological instruments, from thermometers, telescopes, even the LHC?
Lots of points raised in the discussion, all interesting, but it’s hard to quote specific ones to respond to so I’ll respond to the whole discussion.
The point is just about how we trust beyond the range of our direct senses, in both space and time. That is, at scales too small or large, or on time scales too short or long, to be directly accessible to our senses.
The point is that some are easier to trust, I would argue, than others. It’s not even so much about a real and quantifiable difference, it’s about our subjective feelings about what is trustworthy. And certainly our beliefs will likely influence that.
The question of whether we can ‘see’ atoms and protons with electron microscopy is an interesting example. The visualisations produced by these microscopes are not of visible things, they are of particular electrical potential surfaces. There are human decisions in which potential to choose in order to create an accessible and useful visualisation. There are arguments to be had about whether this constitutes ‘seeing’ protons at all, or whether it is a visualisation of an invisible electric field… and we had already agreed that that electric field is one of the material manifestations that doesn’t directly tell us whether or not protons exist but requires us to make inferences.
Maybe we are simply struggling with how to make sense of features of the world that lie outside the range of our ordinary human perceptive abilities. When you look at animals, they instinctively know how to deal with stuff at their own level. Looking up from my screen just now I see the squirrels running around in the trees, jumping from branch to branch with careless abandon. They just know how to deal with trees and trunks and branches, that is effectively the totality of their world. Some aspect of us as humans is very much the same - we feel comfortable in the ordinary world of our day to day experience, and when confronted with things at extraordinary scales, be it much smaller or much bigger, maybe we just try to transform them back into our familiar scale range so we are again instinctively comfortable with them?
As primates, we understand apples and oranges like squirrels understand trees. So when we have figured out that there are strange little things like atoms and protons (and that has taken us long enough), we kind of want them to be like apples and oranges again because then we are comfortable with them. Because then they become trustworthy, as you say.
I am not sure it actually matters at all if they exist, or in what sense. We have the physics and the math to tell us how these ‘things’ interact and eventually affect us. Whether we can compare them intuitively with apples and oranges or not - why is that important? Perhaps we should just acknowledge our limitations and accept that there are an awful lot of things out there that we just are not equipped for to ‘grasp’, even as we can mathematically describe their effects on their surroundings quite accurately.
Is the ‘trust’ issue our animal selves pushing back against our intellectual selves?
I actually thought of this as I answered “yes” to the question (not that I confused proton with photon). There are many things that man defines as “X” thing that can be quantified and reasoned, but not observed directly without other input. Gravity, magnetism, light, sound…eventually, we will define another level of understanding…photons, gluons, quarks, etc…then another (someone will find the makeup of a quark)…and so on…even when we think we have it all figured out, there will be another level of understanding.
This was an interesting example…even when we get to the point of slowing it down enough to see it pass by, the photon is still elusive and not really what we (or I) imagined. (Single photon passes at 11:01 at 10 trillion FPS)
