Welcome to crunching and the Forums, Macburns, and thank you for your post
It's interesting for me to read about the observations you made
- as to any scientific implications, I'll be interested in reading what could be said about them as well.

Where do you come from? You could put a country in your Forum Profile
- button #6 from the left in ^^^ the gray bar up there

To expand a bit on Sgt Joes thought:
There are so many sets of data you can compare, the likelyhood you find some that correlate is high. However, only few of these will also have a causation involved, most develop only by chance over some timespan but vanish soon after.

My common sense says me, there is no causation between solar and vulcanic activity, although I am aware that this judgement could come because of my limited knowledge of both subjects.

How long was the time span you looked at while coming to your conclusion? And how many events were there with a correlation and how many without?

Hello Macburns,

First of all, it's very important to keep in mind that science is for _disproving_ things. The only thing we know "for sure" based on the scientific method are the things which aren't true. If I have a theory which says "if A then B" and you see A but B doesn't happen, I just disproved my theory (yay!). But no matter how many times I see "A then B", I can never be 100% certain that A causes B.

Our "scientific knowledge" is just a bunch of theories which we haven't disproved yet :) (but as time goes on and we prod at those theories and they hold up, our confidence in them increases - we just can't be ever 100% certain in them based on the scientific method).

Now, with that out of the way, we must consider that we have two kinds of science:

- "hard" science where we have a proposed theory of action. These are common in physics for example. One example would be "sunspot activity radiates alpha particles which excite the magma and cause vulcanic eruptions". The good thing about these is that we can test them! Like:
- do we see more alpha particles during sunspot activity?
- can we "excite" magma with artificially created alpha particles?
- etc., etc

The good thing about these theories that it's pretty easy (at least in principle) to test them. The bad part is that it's hard to come up with these theories. You need to be pretty familiar with the interacting pieces to be able to do so.


- "soft" science where we observe a bunch of things and trough statistics we derive some correlations (like "sunspot activity causes vulcanos to erupt"). This is common in very complex systems where we have only a very superficial understanding of the actual mechanics (like economics, medicine, psychology, etc).

The good thing about these theories is that we can create them without having a full understanding of the system. The bad thing is that it's very tricky to test them and they don't always offer a course of action (because usually if we know that A causes B we would like to change something to get more or less of B).

TL;DR: science is complicated, not 100% accurate but it's the best tool we have!

The research scientists I worked with always said, "Data if tortured long enough will confess!"