Got to love this article. It certainly is written by someone from a theoretical science background working on another Phd.
Basically, what it is saying is that the way we work out theories is flawed because we don’t have all the data. What a surprise. However, that is what theories are for they allow people to guess what the missing data is and then experiment until they disprove the theory. A theory is never proved 100% although most are accepted as proven by experiments scientists like the work on them to enhance the theory.
In many cases people have extrapolated the missing data from observation and managed to fill in the blanks. In others they have added the missing data into a big X and allocated a single number to it. We have no idea what each unit is or it’s proportion and the theories still hold sound so do we really care in many areas. Eventually we will work it out more clearly as we learn more about the process.
So the old method we were taught in school, which was to watch what was going on, work out a theory and test it, repeat until it fails or we can explain what is going on seems to still be the way to go. It’s the scientific method. Or to put in a scientific way ‘Based on observations, scientists build models that, in turn, are used to make predictions. To the extent that the predictions are successful, scientists conclude that their models are accurate.’ Sounds pretty much like science from the first time someone looked at something and tried to explain why it happened to another.
It’s a plain fact that you don’t know what you don’t know but observation and testing helps us learn more of what we didn’t know which in turn helps us learn more about that and related areas. All held together by theories and experimentation.
Maybe we should be showing these techniques to the Climate Change crowds.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. — Groucho Marx (1890 – 1977)
The scientific method is still the best
Got to love this article. It certainly is written by someone from a theoretical science background working on another Phd.
Basically, what it is saying is that the way we work out theories is flawed because we don’t have all the data. What a surprise. However, that is what theories are for they allow people to guess what the missing data is and then experiment until they disprove the theory. A theory is never proved 100% although most are accepted as proven by experiments scientists like the work on them to enhance the theory.
In many cases people have extrapolated the missing data from observation and managed to fill in the blanks. In others they have added the missing data into a big X and allocated a single number to it. We have no idea what each unit is or it’s proportion and the theories still hold sound so do we really care in many areas. Eventually we will work it out more clearly as we learn more about the process.
So the old method we were taught in school, which was to watch what was going on, work out a theory and test it, repeat until it fails or we can explain what is going on seems to still be the way to go. It’s the scientific method. Or to put in a scientific way ‘Based on observations, scientists build models that, in turn, are used to make predictions. To the extent that the predictions are successful, scientists conclude that their models are accurate.’ Sounds pretty much like science from the first time someone looked at something and tried to explain why it happened to another.
It’s a plain fact that you don’t know what you don’t know but observation and testing helps us learn more of what we didn’t know which in turn helps us learn more about that and related areas. All held together by theories and experimentation.
Maybe we should be showing these techniques to the Climate Change crowds.