>You're dodging again. This isn't the same as your paraphrase "he
>thought its inconsistencies were a sign of being incomplete."
I realize that's unclear. What I mean is you're leaving out the context of why this bothered Einstein so much. The inconsistencies were what prompted his statement about not believing god played dice with the universe (to which Stephen Hawking has replied that god plays dice all the time).
Anyway, this preoccupation of Einstein's also belies your contention that science depends on empirical verification. It equally depends on abstract questioning and theorizing that waits for later verification. You're suggesting we play dice with climate change and playing a shell game with the evidence to support your position.
>November 2, 2002
>
>THINK TANK; What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right.
>
>By EMILY EAKIN
>
>In 1848, by then a nationally celebrated poet, Edgar Allan Poe
>published ''Eureka,'' a 150-page prose poem on the nature and origin
>of the universe. The work, an overheated grab bag of metaphysics and
>cosmology, was a flop. A reviewer for Literary World likened it to
>''arrant fudge.'' A hundred years later T. S. Eliot summed up the
>critical consensus. ''Eureka,'' he wrote, ''makes no deep impression
>. . . because we are aware of Poe's lack of qualification in
>philosophy, theology or natural science.''
>
>Of course, Eliot had a point: ''Eureka'' was the work of an amateur,
>a backyard stargazer who read astronomy books in his spare time.
>
>But Eliot -- himself no scientist -- was underestimating his fellow
>poet. Eighty years before 20th-century cosmologists hammered out the
>math, Poe, it turns out, came up with a rudimentary version of
>contemporary science's best guess for explaining how the universe began.
>
>Departing from conventional wisdom of the day, which saw the
>universe as static and eternal, Poe insisted that it had exploded
>into being from a single ''primordial particle'' in ''one
>instantaneous flash.''
>
>''From the one particle, as a center,'' he wrote, ''let us suppose
>to be irradiated spherically -- in all directions -- to immeasurable
>but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space -- a
>certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet
>not infinitely minute atoms.''
>
>The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong
>(Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to
>speak of the universe exploding into ''previously vacant space''),
>but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a
>theory that didn't find mainstream approval until the 1960's.
>
>This wasn't Poe's only uncanny display of prescience. He also came
>up with the idea that the universe was expanding (and might
>eventually collapse), a notion that the Russian mathematician
>Alexander Friedmann ferreted out of Einstein's equations in 1922.
>Einstein initially pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasn't widely
>accepted until the 1930's, after Edwin Hubble gleaned some hard data
>from the velocities of far-flung galaxies.
>
>Black holes? Poe envisioned something like those, too. And he was
>the first person on record to solve the Olbers Paradox, which had
>dogged astronomers since Kepler: the mystery of why the sky is dark
>at night. If the universe was infinite, as 19th-century astronomers
>believed, there should be an infinite number of stars as well,
>plenty, in other words, to illuminate the sky at all times. Poe
>understood why this in fact was not the case: the universe is finite
>in time and space (and light from some stars has not yet reached the
>Milky Way).
>
>So what accounts for Poe's prophetic genius? Tom Siegfried, the
>science editor of The Dallas Morning News, doesn't explain just how
>the poet derived his cosmological theory, but in his new book,
>''Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and
>Time'' (Joseph Henry Press), he argues that the history of
>astrophysics is littered with such ''prediscoveries,'' or
>''instances of theoretical anticipation.''
>
>''There are lots of things theorists predict on the basis of what's
>known and what's already been found,'' Mr. Siegfried explained in a
>telephone interview. ''The distinction with prediscovery is that
>theorists discover the existence of something observers have never
>seen. It's one thing to figure out an explanation for the
>observation. It's another thing altogether to suggest something
>exists that no one had any idea about beforehand.''
>
>Unlike, say, Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of ''flying machines'' or
>Jules Verne's descriptions of submarines and televisions decades
>before such objects were ever made, scientific prediscoveries, as
>Mr. Siegfried defines them, are not human inventions awaiting
>technological realization, but rather insights into the nature of reality.
>
>''Eureka'' may be Mr. Siegfried's most striking example, a literary
>mind hitting the cosmological jackpot. But his list of bona fide
>prediscoveries includes an impressive number of contemporary
>physics' most basic concepts: antimatter, electromagnetic waves,
>neutron stars, neutrinos, quarks and atoms.
>
>In the 1860's the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell inferred
>the existence of invisible radiation from a mathematical analysis of
>electricity and magnetism. (Nine years after his death, Maxwell was
>proved right when the radio waves were discovered by the German
>physicist Heinrich Hertz.)
>
>In 1931 the English physicist Paul Dirac came up with a more
>preposterous-sounding notion: antimatter. From the mathematical
>equations of other physicists, Dirac concluded that electrons, one
>of the observed building blocks of atoms, must have identical but
>oppositely charged twins. The following year Carl Anderson, an
>American physicist, identified a positively charged electron, or
>positron, the first antiparticle.
>
>And around the same time, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli
>prediscovered the neutrino: a neutral particle so light and
>undetectable that it could pass through a lead wall trillions of
>miles thick without a trace.
>
>Given the number of successful prediscoveries in the past, Mr.
>Siegfried argues, some of the wacky ideas floating around in
>astrophysics today are bound to be validated sooner or later. That
>turns out to be an alarming proposition: Mr. Siegfried's book is
>filled with enough mysterious hypothetical entities -- some of
>which, under the right circumstances could snuff out the earth in a
>nanosecond -- to sustain a dozen Hollywood thrillers.
>
>Which object will turn out to be real? Cosmic Q-balls (''lumps of
>super matter that may have formed when tiny superparticles
>coagulated in the hot dense phase of the early universe'')?
>Wimpzillas (particles ''heavier than a million billion ordinary
>subatomic particles'')? Or quark nuggets (a four-ton object less
>than one twenty-fifth of an inch long that could ''shoot through
>Earth like a bullet through butter'')?
>
>Any of these concepts might help solve the mystery of ''dark
>matter,'' the unidentified stuff that astronomers believe makes up
>90 percent or more of an average galaxy's mass. Personally, Mr.
>Siegfried said, he's betting on WIMP's -- that's short for weakly
>interacting massive particles -- thought to be heavy, generally
>unstable particles that hover in the outer regions of galaxies and
>rarely interact with ordinary matter.
>
>As extravagant as some of these potential prediscoveries sound, the
>astronomers behind them have a substantial leg up on Poe. They're
>working within a scientific world, using the latest technology,
>trading information and comparing notes. And yet Mr. Siegfried
>raises the tantalizing possibility that valuable scientific ideas
>may lie outside science, awaiting a mathematical mind to seize on
>them: Alexander Friedmann, the man credited with inferring the
>expansion of the universe from Einstein's theory, he notes, loved Poe.
>
>Did Friedmann read ''Eureka?'' No one seems to know. Nevertheless,
>Mr. Siegfried speculates, it's quite possible ''that Friedmann was
>conditioned by Poe's imagination to see the true meaning of
>Einstein's equations, whereas others, Einstein included, did not.''
>
>As for Poe, he never doubted that his ideas would eventually get
>their due. ''What I have propounded will (in good time)
>revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science,'' he
>wrote to a friend in 1848. ''I say this calmly -- but I say it.''
>
>Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company