Built on Facts: The Theory of Theory

Matt’s commentary on the idea of “just a theory” at the Language of Bad Physics Blog (to which I linked recently) along with a quick example.

I put “theory” in scare quotes not because amateurs can’t make contributions to physics – they can and do – but because there’s a heck of a lot of cranks out there with theories that aren’t actually theories. In physics, if you want to come up with a theory at minimum it has to:

1. Generate numbers.
2. Match those numbers consistently with observation.

If there’s one widespread trait among cranks, crackpots and other related species, it’s not understanding or accepting the concept of falsifiability, and why if one is wrong, one must be verifiably wrong. I suspect that they simply don’t accept the possibility that they could be wrong.