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Ok, Newtonian physics. That was accepted for a long time because it was utterly, utterly consistent with all our evidence. Until it wasn't, in some edge cases.
by graeme 11y ago
Ok, Newtonian physics. That was accepted for a long time because it was utterly, utterly consistent with all our evidence.
Until it wasn't, in some edge cases. And we adopted a new theory that explained things better.
My point was that the impossibility of induction is at the core of science. Science generally does things well because it accounts for this. I cited financial crashes as an example of what can happen if you don't account for induction.
What, exactly, are you disagreeing with?
- cbd1984 11y agoAnd it's still consistent with most of our everyday evidence. It hasn't been falsified, it's been expanded. There's a difference.
- scott_s 11y agoNo, the universe Newton described was falsified. In the Newtonian universe, information (including gravitation and electrical attraction) travelled instantly. Kuhn talks about this concept quite a bit in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Relativity was not merely an expansion of the Newtonian explanation of the universe. It was a complete change of our understanding of how the universe worked, even though relativity reduces to the same equations as Newtonian mechanics at low velocities and low masses.