"Mike Helland" wrote in message
om...
"Bill Hobba" wrote in message
...

snip
What I meant by learning what science is was test, hypothesize, test,
hypothesize, over and over. That was taught in grade 8. Popper had to
wait
until later.

But the above is enough to draw some general conclusions that are not
considered time and time again on this newsgroup.

1. Nothing about reality, whatever that is, is mentioned.
2. Nothing about the theory conforming someone's view of common sense.
3. Nothing about the hypothesis requiring direct experiential evidence
4. Nothing about the scientists not being able to create hypothesis by
studying equations, philosophy or anything else they damn well feel like
5. The hypostasis must have testable consequences.
6. Nothing about the hypothesis conforming to someone idea of what
physical
is.
7. Nothing about the theory conforming to someone's idea of cause and
effect.
8. Nothing preventing the theory not being expressed in mathematical
language
9. Nothing saying the hypothesis can not concern the origin of the
universe.

It is summed up in one sentence - science is concerned with
correspondence
with experiment - end of story.

If you are interested in Popper it might be worth pointing out that
you are out of step with him right here.

Quite possibly - I was not trying to be carefull - you do not need such to
spot the obvious errors of cranks.


Summed up in a sentence, science is the method of making a conjecture
to explain something, and making criticisms to test the conjecture
with. Carefully note that:

10. Nothing in that says the tests need to be physical experiments.

Well I think you need to be carefull what you mean by 'tests'. If you
include checking things like logical consistency and how well they mesh with
other theories then OK.


For example, there are no tests that falsify relativity or quantum
mechanics?


Correct.

But we know that there is something wrong with the picture
they paint.


Let us be carefull about what is going on. First all theories have a domain
of applicability. And it is not true to say GR (which is what I hope you
are referring to by relativity) is incompatible with QM - they can be bought
into line providing we have a cutoff - http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9512024.
What we do not have is a theory that peeks behind the cutoff - we have a
number of attempts such as string theory and loop quantum gravity but as yet
no generally agreed resolution. Thus I would not say there is anything
wrong with QM or GR - I would say we do not know the physics in a certain
region which is about the plank scale.

How can that be if they pass every experiment?

Simple - all theories have a domain of applicability.

Well, the
criticism has been made that general relativity won't co-exist with
the uncertainty principle.

The paper I linked to shows otherwise.


So thats a test. If we can tweak relativity somehow, or perhaps tweak
the uncertainty principle somehow so that they can co-exist, our new
conjecture will have passed that test. As long as its descriptive
power is not adversely affected, that there is one fewer
compatibility, one fewer critical test the new theory fails, then we
say that the new theory is better than the old one.

That is Popper in a nutshell.

Or maybe extending theories into new domains of applicability. When that
occurs one or the other or both may not come thru unscathed or they may
still be found to be valid - it really is quite difficult to predict the
progress of science.

Thanks
Bill


--
http://www.techmocracy.net/music/