ZapperZ’s post and subsequent link recalls a great essay that was in Physics Today a while back, and is available for viewing. Belief and knowledge—a plea about language
A few words in elementary physics— force, work, momentum, and energy—have carefully defined physics meanings. Their much broader everyday usage causes students a great deal of confusion until they learn the precise physics concepts. Rather than belabor such cases, I will focus on some words that are, I think, the root of considerable public misunderstanding of science: belief, hypothesis, theory, and knowledge.
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We need our listeners to know what is tentative and what is not so that they understand better the ragged but cumulative progression of science and can use current knowledge effectively, with an understanding of its inherent uncertainties, in personal and political decision making.
The article touches upon another point: “No matter how many tests have shown us that the laws of physics do not change with time and place in the local region around Earth, how can I assert that I know these laws apply elsewhere in the universe? Again, I must argue from a chain of inference, from self-consistency, and, if you like, from Occam’s razor—it is superfluous to introduce new laws to explain distant observations when existing laws can be used.”
I’ve been meaning to write a post about this point, illustrating the difference between good theories and ad hoc theories. Lots of relativity crackpots, in their attempt to maintain an ‘absolute’ frame of reference, must introduce lots of properties of the aether whose only purpose is to match to experiment, and the ratio of properties to experimental observations is about 1:1. The beauty of Einstein’s relativity is, in large part, the fact that he uses only a few simple postulates to explain dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of experimental observations.
Thanks for sharing such a nice article with us.
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