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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

Also in astronomy, all elements other than hydrogen and helium are considered “metals”: https://public.nrao.edu/blogs/astronomy-is-metal/

It's really not an exact science...

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Well, at astronomical scales, everything's mostly just hydrogen with tiny bits of hard stuff mixed in. :p

>It's really not an exact science...

I think this is the first time I've ever heard someone use this phrase in reference to an actual science

bashing on "big science" seems to be the latest and greatest of the crapflood that is social media today

i saw a video addressing it the other day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xglo2n2AMGc

Well, I would say social sciences arent exact, economics might be a hard science of rules, but the outcomes are subject to too many factors to predict precisely, but it is still a science. Though, well, I am not really qualified to speak on such things, but I would imagine we are fairly precise in the field you guys are talking about.

Economics is a social science, the study of how people interact with things of value. It cannot be hard, since it has a feedback loop.

Thats kind of what I said, the rules are hard, supply and demand, time preference, marginal utility, those are forces that cant be argued with, but it doesnt mean they have precise predictive power.

Sometimes science is more art than science. A lot of people don't get that.

Which is really funny, since Hydrogen can be metallic :) Especially so in astronomical scenarios.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen

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