3 ms·

Kind of tangential but this reminds me of Feynman: > It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree w

by lloeki 8y ago

Kind of tangential but this reminds me of Feynman: > It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

auslander 8y ago
I have a better one :) "You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing" - stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-breakthrough-disregard-others/
gwern 8y ago
The funny thing about that quote is that Feynman ignored it all the time. Back during the post-WWII explosion, Feynman would get told about some exciting new result and regularly said that the result was wrong because it contradicted theory and was experimental error. And it usually was error. A lot of those anecdotes in his oral history: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/5020-1 https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral...
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  Experimental data comes with confidence levels. There's no point in being excited at low confidence extravagant data. This does not detract from his phrase in any way.
  - gwern 8y ago
    Yes, it does. He didn't say, "it doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, unless of course, it's sufficiently beautiful that it has high posterior probability such that you will dismiss an indefinite but potentially large number of experiments showing it's wrong until enough experiments have been done that you have to admit that it's wrong because it disagrees with them". Of course, Feynman was right to dismiss those experiments. It's his quote which is cute, oversimplified, and wrong. It's Duhem-Quine all over.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  An even funnier aspect is that he was well aware of a today-still-unsolved problem, which he thoroughly expounds in Feynman Lecture chapter 28 volume 2: the mass for an electron, with all the historical attempts at fixing the theory, and he mentions (correctly) but does not show that even in quantum version the problem remains, and even though he knows theres an inconsistency (i.e. electron mass if finite, and infitine, a simple contradiction), he goes through all different attempts at resolving the problem, and for each attempt at solution describes why that way of trying to remove the inconsistency is doomed... he keeps the best argument to the end... the sledge hammer, that there is another electron like particle (muon), with same charge, but totally different mass... the only conclusion is that point charges must be composite! EDIT: my comment seems random the way it is, but the quote implies that a theory must be correct/consistent in order to matter at all... while he knows there is an unresolved inconsistency!

by lloeki 8y ago

Kind of tangential but this reminds me of Feynman: > It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

auslander 8y ago

I have a better one :) "You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing" - stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-breakthrough-disregard-others/

gwern 8y ago

The funny thing about that quote is that Feynman ignored it all the time. Back during the post-WWII explosion, Feynman would get told about some exciting new result and regularly said that the result was wrong because it contradicted theory and was experimental error. And it usually was error. A lot of those anecdotes in his oral history: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/5020-1 https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral...

marcosdumay 8y ago
Experimental data comes with confidence levels. There's no point in being excited at low confidence extravagant data. This does not detract from his phrase in any way.
- gwern 8y ago
  Yes, it does. He didn't say, "it doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, unless of course, it's sufficiently beautiful that it has high posterior probability such that you will dismiss an indefinite but potentially large number of experiments showing it's wrong until enough experiments have been done that you have to admit that it's wrong because it disagrees with them". Of course, Feynman was right to dismiss those experiments. It's his quote which is cute, oversimplified, and wrong. It's Duhem-Quine all over.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
An even funnier aspect is that he was well aware of a today-still-unsolved problem, which he thoroughly expounds in Feynman Lecture chapter 28 volume 2: the mass for an electron, with all the historical attempts at fixing the theory, and he mentions (correctly) but does not show that even in quantum version the problem remains, and even though he knows theres an inconsistency (i.e. electron mass if finite, and infitine, a simple contradiction), he goes through all different attempts at resolving the problem, and for each attempt at solution describes why that way of trying to remove the inconsistency is doomed... he keeps the best argument to the end... the sledge hammer, that there is another electron like particle (muon), with same charge, but totally different mass... the only conclusion is that point charges must be composite! EDIT: my comment seems random the way it is, but the quote implies that a theory must be correct/consistent in order to matter at all... while he knows there is an unresolved inconsistency!