Friday, December 19, 2014

George Ellis and Joe Silk — Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics


Attempts to exempt speculative theories of the Universe from experimental verification undermine science, argue George Ellis and Joe Silk.

Nature
Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics
George Ellis, professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Joe Silk, professor of physics at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, France, and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA
ht Steve Keen retweeting Noah Smith

2 comments:

Magpie said...

Very interesting article, Tom. I highly recommend it and the links he points to.

In particular, I'd suggest Sean Carroll's "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?", where he explains why Karl Popper came up with the idea of falsificationism and why not even Einstein's original general relativity would have passed its test.

And I see now that Noah Smith has joined the discussion. This promises to be great fun.

Magpie said...

Oops. This is the link to Carroll's post:

http://edge.org/response-detail/25322