1/11/2024 0 Comments Stack of books background![]() ![]() I use its mathematical formalism whenever I give or interpret directions. The flat Earth hypothesis is a good idea. Pseudoscience vs falsified real science: the scientific method is the slaughterhouse of good ideas. Pop science: The value of popular science books on speculative physics, besides book sales, is to build public interest and thereby attract scholars and grant money to projects for the extension of human knowledge. So far it remains an extremely cumbersome, but apparently viable, way of duplicating the results of well established quantum mechanics. A side benefit is that it drives the discovery of new kinds of mathematics relevant to the structure of the physical world, which can itself lead to new predictions by old models, or the formulation of still other new models.Įxample: String Theory hopes to eventually be able to make predictions related to the effects of gravity on the smallest scales. The great value of new models where old models work well is that the new models may suggest new predictions, which hopefully can suggest new experiments, which allows for their falsification or, hopefully, the ability to make successful predictions that we previously couldn't make. Given the staggering complexity of the math used in the candidate models, these may also be extremely non-obvious. Or they may make predictions outside the domain of relevance of the old model. New models: New mathematical formalisms for established evidence may turn out to make empirical predictions that contradict the predictions of the old model within its domain, but in ways that we had not yet been able to test. If everyone had been content to shut up and calculate, this important discovery of 20th century physics might never have been made. By 1970, that claim had been expressed mathematically, described in terms of empirical predictions, measured, and falsified. If so, they are no longer arbitrary, but constitute substantive predictions.Įxample: In 1920, physicists didn't know that there could be empirical predictions made about the claim that quantum randomness could be explained in terms of human ignorance of some difficult or impossible to measure classically deterministic antecedent(s). Interpretations: Within a model, words can sometimes be translated into math in ways we did not expect and are not remotely obvious. Which mathematical formalism we use to map successfully between accurate measurements of reality is arbitrary so long as they work, and what words we use to describe what the math means are arbitrary so long as the math works. Unlike pseudoscience, both types of speculation in physics begin with evidence, remain constrained by evidence, and have falsifiable empirical predictions as the end goal. ![]()
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