On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 chris peck <chris_peck...@hotmail.com> wrote: > its at the core of Popper's view that theories should aim to be productive >
Wow, theories should be productive, only a super genius could figure that out! > in making falsifiable predictions and you are only regurgitating that > view because rightly or wrongly, via Popper, it has seeped into our > culture's conception of what good science is. 150 years ago, you wouldn't > have really cared. > That is asinine. 250 years ago the young Jean-Paul Marat tried to get into the French Academy of Science on the basis of his thesis on animal magnetism. The greatest chemist of the 18'th century, Antoine Lavoisier recommended against this and called Marat's paper worthless because it led to nothing that could be tested. Marat never forgot or forgave and 20 years later when he became a leader of the French Revolution he ordered that poor Lavoisier, probably the greatest mind in France, be beheaded. > You would have been happy had scientists worked purely inductively. > Are you seriously trying to tell me that popper invented deductive reasoning?! Euclid, who lived 2500 years before Popper was born would have been very surprised to hear that, and so would Imhotep who lived 2000 years before Euclid. >> all of them agree that it matters that string "theory" has not made any >> testable prediction. >> > > > No, there are testable predictions. They make predictions like we might > see xyz happen when we smash particles together at abc energies. > What the hell? First you say, correctly, that string theory has not made any testable predictions, and now you're saying it has. You can't make up your mind what you're disagreeing with. > And we spend lots of cash seeing if that is true. > By "that" I assume you mean the standard model, and up to now all the results from our huge billion dollar particle accelerators conform with it precisely, and that's the problem, it's not leading us to new physics. Not finding the Higgs Boson would have been a huge surprise but we found it, in fact a particle accelerator hasn't found anything surprising in about 40 years. > But eventually, the community begins to get hacked off and goes: wouldn't > it be better to stop testing until we have some prediction that is > falsifiable? > Stop testing what? String theory has given us nothing to test. The standard model has given us lots to test and so far it is always right, damn it. Until accelerators find something surprising they can't help us go beyond the standard model. > > It wasn't Popper's concern to help particular theories develop > falsifiable predictions it was his concern to argue that they should. > Any idiot knows they should, but it takes a genius to figure out how, and unfortunately popper was no genius. > The fact you employ words like pseudoscience shows that he has. You think > about science in Popper's terms. > One doesn't need to read Popper to know that pseudoscience exists, just reading this list can do that. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
