{"id":5465,"date":"2010-05-09T03:00:18","date_gmt":"2010-05-09T08:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=5465"},"modified":"2010-05-09T03:00:18","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T08:00:18","slug":"theory-theory-whos-got-the-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/5465","title":{"rendered":"Theory, Theory, Who&#039;s Got the Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/builtonfacts\/2010\/05\/i_was_recently_told_about.php\">Built on Facts:  The Theory of Theory<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Matt&#8217;s commentary on the idea of &#8220;just a theory&#8221; at the Language of Bad Physics Blog (<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/5235\">to which I linked recently<\/a>) along with a quick example.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I put &#8220;theory&#8221; in scare quotes not because amateurs can&#8217;t make contributions to physics &#8211; they can and do &#8211; but because there&#8217;s a heck of a lot of cranks out there with theories that aren&#8217;t actually theories. In physics, if you want to come up with a theory at minimum it has to:<\/p>\n<p>1. Generate numbers.<br \/>\n2. Match those numbers consistently with observation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If there&#8217;s one widespread trait among cranks, crackpots and other related species, it&#8217;s not understanding or accepting the concept of falsifiability, and why if one is wrong, one must be <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/70\">verifiably wrong<\/a>.  I suspect that they simply don&#8217;t accept the possibility that they could be wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Built on Facts: The Theory of Theory Matt&#8217;s commentary on the idea of &#8220;just a theory&#8221; at the Language of Bad Physics Blog (to which I linked recently) along with a quick example. I put &#8220;theory&#8221; in scare quotes not &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/5465\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,39,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiscience","category-physics","category-science-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}