swansont

Yes, this is what everyone has been saying. What is the distinction that you are drawing here? It is lost on me. You claimed "could not have appeared in any background assumption or auxiliary hypothesis " and yet here we have this as a background assumption, leading to the prediction and discovery.

I had science in mind, and not just math. You lose something when you try and reduce this to an algebra problem. Science uses math, but it is not just math. It's all in how you set up the problem. You say nothing has changed in the problem. But this is science _ we do a measurement, and find that x is not 3. It is 2.5. We rewrite the equation 2x + y = 6 and conclude that y is 1. We would then go and do a measurement to confirm that y is indeed 1. It's still math — we haven't changed that. It's the realization that there are two variables, not one, and writing down 2x = 6 was not encompassing everything. You seem to be suggesting that because we had confirmed 7 planets that we were not allowed to write down an equation that had 8 planets to see if that were a better fit for the data. Which is preposterous. And yet, that's what happened. Your hypothesis does not match with history. Ergo, it is false. It is amazing that you can say that you can't measure something in a system by measuring everything else involved in the system, and solving for the unknown. Because in my first postdoc, that's exactly what we set out to do. It's hard to measure neutrinos, so we measured the emitted electrons and the recoils of the daughters to deduce the neutrino spectrum. But you now tell me we could not have done this.

! Moderator Note This is a science discussion forum, not a conspiracy site. Take this nonsense elsewhere.

But that's not naive falsification. NONE of the example given above are examples of naive falsification, as you have described it. And so here you argue that naive falsification is in effect, when I thought we agreed that it wasn't. Which position are you arguing? Who are the people who are insisting this? Are they perhaps made of straw? Major paradigms perhaps, but for lesser ideas it happens regularly. One has to consider that to become a major paradigm, there must be considerable evidence that supports it. For hypotheses without that support, experiments that fail to corroborate will relegate it to the trash heap much faster. Chances are few people hear about it, because such work is rarely published. Nothing surprising here for anyone familiar with science, and some of this has already been noted in this discussion.

Then why bring it up? What other reason do you have for mentioning it, if you are interested in what scientists do? (and this is somthing you agree they ought not do , and don't do) And you then proceeded to argue a different point. Right. And this is what Reg is missing. If relativity were wrong, odds are very, very good we would have already noticed it. So we can proceed under the provisional thinking that it's correct, but also knowing that if there were a problem, then it will manifest itself in experiments that rely on it being correct. Making every experiment that relies on a theory an implicit test of that theory (i.e. questioning it) even if the purpose of the experiment is not an explicit test to see if the theory is valid, because we assume it's good (i.e. not questioning it)

Testing a theory and someone being hell-bent on changing it are two very different scenarios. The only one pushing this naive falsification model is you. It's a strawman. You seem to be using "questioned" in a different way than everyone else. Your "naive falsification" would have us dropping every theory with a single anomalous result, as I discussed earlier. What actually happens is science checks to see if there is an explanation consistent with the mainstream theory first. Otherwise we would be dropping basic concepts every so often, only to reinstate them later. It would be a mess. Sorry, I should have written "questioned" so as not to confuse you. It's being used in at least two different senses in these conversations. I had thought the context of the paragraph in which that statement appeared would suffice to make clear how I meant it. But I was wrong.

To some extent that's true. Show that relativity is wrong and a whole lot of stuff comes crashing down. But it has to be wrong for that to hold, otherwise it's adjustments, as you say. Merely showing limitations of the theory, much like the limitations of Newtonian physics, failing at large speeds, or GR not being compatible with QM at very small scales, does not make the model wrong.

And those headlines are just for direct tests. What of the thousands of science papers published every year? Or just the workings in a lab that fall short of being publishable? The clocks I work on wouldn't function as advertised without QM and relativity working. We get people here claiming relativity is wrong and there is an aether, and yet I know that's not possible because I can do something simple like align a laser into a single-mode optical fiber and have it stay aligned all day, something that would fail if we were moving through an aether. To claim otherwise is to ignore they ways that science is interconnected and how it rests upon its foundations.

I don't see the distinction you are drawing, but yes, Phi answered the question that was asked. So you are bringing up a different topic, and yet claim that Phi gave an incorrect answer. The best you can say is that it is an unanswered question. There is no guarantee that you will be able to collect data for any arbitrary set of conditions, but that is not required. It doesn't stop some people from demanding it, of course, but they often have an agenda (in my experience) Gravity is not questioned, either. You reach a point where the weight of evidence is sufficient that it's a waste of time and effort to confirm the basic theory. You then move on to more advanced topics — but that doesn't mean that you have stopped testing the theory. It just means you have moved on to indirect tests, i.e. where the experiment would fail if the underlying paradigm were wrong, and will only succeed if the new idea (based on that paradigm) is correct. We see this all the time in physics. You don't need to confirm e.g. time dilation with every experiment, but can run experiments that would fail if relativity were wrong. It's a matter prioritizing your limited resources. The smart money is on a well-tested theory being right. You don't abandon that theory based on one outlier of a data point. We didn't chuck relativity in the trash when the Gran Sasso experiment indicated superluminal neutrinos, because we had over 100 years of experiments, combined with a solid theoretical framework, telling us that relativity is correct. By the time we'd gotten there, a contradictory result became an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a single experiment isn't that. Nevertheless, relativity was being tested with that experiment, even if the purpose of the experiment was something other than testing relativity.

So in what way does this not agree with Phi's response, that current science is questioned all the time? That the answer is often "yes, current science is consistent with what we know" does not mean that it is not being questioned. We only occasionally find answers that require adjusting the current paradigm.

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No, not so much. If the theory predicts a clock will show a certain amount of elapsed time in an experiment, or the frequency will shift a certain amount, and that's what you measure, there's not a lot of room for "interpretation" Argument from personal incredulity is about as effective as a nerf® vibrator.

Fortunately, your comprehension is not the metric we use. Does a spherical or cylindrical coordinate system curve? GR uses non-Euclidean geometry. It is what describes spacetime, and it is curved. No. What makes it true is that experiment agrees with the theory.

! Moderator Note No, that's not going to happen. Big Bang is mainstream physics and discussion of it and the lines of evidence that support it can and should be discussed in the science sections. And you should stop hijacking discussions to air your dissatisfaction with the situation.

SamCogar has been suspended 3 days for repeatedly going anywhere and everywhere but on-topic.