Test time! (Was reverse Sokal)

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Sun Nov 10 23:35:48 PST 2002



> Regarding the relation between proof and experiment,
> the computer
> scientist and mathematician Donald Knuth is supposed
> to have written
> this of a theoretical result of his: "Warning to the
> reader--I have only
> proved the foregoing to be true, not tested it."
>

It's said that Spinoza was asked whether his was the "best" philosophy. "No," he replied, "but it is the true philosophy."

There's a lot of stuff that rightly or wrongly is regarded as true ins science that is not subject to direct experimental verification--that's what's wrong with simple falsificationism. Sometimes this varies over time. The "corpuscularian hypothesis" (that,a s we say, there are atoms) was simply a hypothesis that needed to be made to make sense of lots of other stuff until Einstein proved that it could be tested in his Brownian motion paper, the one that won him the Nobel Prize. the theory of evolution is obviosuly not subject to direct test. Both views have empirical consequences, but pre-Einsteina atomism and evolutionary theory gain much of their conformation from the work they do in organizing other things that we can observe more directly.

jks

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