Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
That's basically what Sontag said. Science is the process of disproving theories.
Well, hopefully you don't. It depends upon how much emotional capital you have invested in your theory. It's easy to class the stuff that doesn't prove your case as "experimental error", and avoid questioning your theory.
People question the constants all the time, and there as assortment of "What If" games speculating what the results would be if certain constants had a different value. Fred Pohl calls them "Gosh numbers", as in "Because that constant has the value it does, life can exist in our universe. Gosh!"
But they are considered constants because no one has come up with other values that can be plugged into the equations in their place and yield meaningful results. Like other theories, they've survived repeated attempts to question them.
My concern is different. Science is supposed to be the process of accumulating facts, and coming up with a theory to explain them. It can falter when you come up with a grand theory first, then look for facts to justify it.
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Dennis
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That indeed is a major problem with physics today. Everybody want to find the TOE (Theory Of Everything) even though, Kurt Godel proved that there can be no TOE, at least in a mathematical sense, in 1931. (Sorry, I don't know how to make a umlat o.) Since Godel was not a physicist, he doesn't count to physicists, and off they go...
But the trap I'm talking about is more subtle. I went to a lecture by the late John Wheeler, on nothing. Literally. It was about zero vacuum energy, and how the calculations defining it and the reality measured didn't match by an order of 58th power. n x 10 to the 58th. Which everyone else ignores, because the quantum energy model work elsewhere so well. He gave the lecture to try to interest young physicists in the fundamental study of what the structure of vacuum really is, and maybe explain why the huge gap exists. But if you really start trying to analyse a vacuum, you bump up against
C . (speed of light in a vacuum). And that's an immutable constant in physics. It and Plank's constant are sancrosant. If you suggest otherwise, you're unceremonially pitched out the door. So nobody studies what the structure of a vacuum really is, and how
C is derived from it... (And the trap closes).