Posted by John Nichols on March 03, 2006 at 04:57:29 from 165.91.47.13 user Mcneacail.
In Reply to: Re: History of Science (was Map dowsing) posted by Lyn on March 02, 2006 at 22:01:47:
Dear Lyn:
You are close but not quite as pedantic as a pure scientist would have you express the idea?
Science starts with a testable hypothesis such as
1. Jock is a girl.
The hypothesis is either true or false.
A standard test would be to strip Jock naked and undertake a visual inspection. For most people this is enough.
But some girls are actually boys in sheep's clothing and so we need to do a genetic test.
In the end we know - Jock is a boy.
There is no religion merely testable facts.
Of course this presumes we have defined a Jock and a boy and a girl and so the cycle goes on.
Merely academic papers that build a sustained body of knowledge. The point of publishing is to get one's theory accepted. There is a very famous paper in which an eminent scientist demolished 20 years of research by 5 major univerities in 4 pages. Actually his post doc did and he was second author. It was a beautiful understatement of "this is crap". A 28 year old destroyed a lot of reputations with that paper.
Hypothesis 2: There are an infinite number of numbers between 1 and 2.
I would answer that by saying it is self evident. You can accept the statement or require me to prove it.
If I proved it
1+delta < 1.5 assume is true (1)
therefore 1+ delta + delta/2 < 1.75 (2)
therefore delta is less than 0.5
delta < 0.5
therefore 1+delta +delta/2 +delta/4 < 1.875
and we have an infinte series 0+1+0.5+0.25+0.125 .... <2 as we can never reach 2 in this series.
The numbers are infinite not the biggest infinite set as we could have numbers in between.
JMN