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Sigh, so true. Heartening that Shor has the same thoughts about the grant system that I do. I don't have quite the same critical perspective as the blogger, bu

Sigh, so true. Heartening that Shor has the same thoughts about the grant system that I do. I don't have quite the same critical perspective as the blogger, but I think there's a certain misguided attitude underlying the phenomena observed by Shor. Yesterday or the day before I was listening to the radio and someone with a physics background was talking about something (I think quantum entanglement) and started asserting that physics has basically figured out almost everything. This is probably a somewhat unfair paraphrase, but not too unfair. What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. This is certainly true some of the time, but sometimes those little empirical cracks are what brings down a major paradigm, and leads to another one, one that has the same predictions as in 99% of the cases, but in the other 1% has totally different predictions with very different implications. This carries over to grant funding, etc. in that the prevailing community often assumes that what they're doing is fine, and all that's left are these little empirical tweaks. That's certainly helpful some of the time, but it seems to dominate too much. Academics needs to leave more room for people to fail at high rates with good ideas, to increase those small percent of times they succeed wildly.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. Haha, no. We wish. Epicycles worked very well and were highly accurate, because, as Fourier analysis later showed, any smooth curve can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favour with the discovery that planetary motions were largely elliptical from a heliocentric frame of reference, which led to the discovery that gravity obeying a simple inverse square law could better explain all planetary motions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle A theory can explain observations even perfectly well and still be wrong- because the frame of reference is wrong. The worse thing is that you can't figure that out until you've figured out what the correct frame of reference is, and looked at your obsrevations in a new light.
- jon_richards 8y ago
  See also: relativity, quantum physics, etc.
- andrepd 8y ago
  >A theory can explain observations even perfectly well and still be wrong- because the frame of reference is wrong. The worse thing is that you can't figure that out until you've figured out what the correct frame of reference is, and looked at your obsrevations in a new light. Well strictly speaking, it wasn't wrong. It explained the observations perfectly well. What a heliocentric description brought was a simpler description that illuminated the principles behind it, in a way that enabled us to discover the inverse-square law of gravity, link that to Gauss's theorem for gravitation, explain it even from a more fundamental geometric perspective with general relativity, etc.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    It was wrong in the sense that epicycles are an entirely imaginary math artefact, and reality works on different principles. Revolutions happen when a new mental model - or frame of reference, or whatever you want to call it - can generate new kinds of math. The old model is certainly wrong in the sense that it's not a good picture of how reality actually works. If you really want to, you can still use epicycles for certain kinds of problem, just as you can use Newtonian physics for basic mechanics. But this is engineering, not physics. These theories are useless for frontier research. They're absolutely wrong in the sense that their lack of completeness means they cannot be used to generate theory[n+1].
    - pdonis 8y ago
      > It was wrong in the sense that epicycles are an entirely imaginary math artefact, and reality works on different principles. How do you distinguish "an entirely imaginary math artifact" from the "principles" that "reality works on"? (Hint: planetary orbits are not ellipses once you take GR effects into account.)

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. Haha, no. We wish. Epicycles worked very well and were highly accurate, because, as Fourier analysis later showed, any smooth curve can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favour with the discovery that planetary motions were largely elliptical from a heliocentric frame of reference, which led to the discovery that gravity obeying a simple inverse square law could better explain all planetary motions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle A theory can explain observations even perfectly well and still be wrong- because the frame of reference is wrong. The worse thing is that you can't figure that out until you've figured out what the correct frame of reference is, and looked at your obsrevations in a new light.

jon_richards 8y ago
See also: relativity, quantum physics, etc.
andrepd 8y ago
>A theory can explain observations even perfectly well and still be wrong- because the frame of reference is wrong. The worse thing is that you can't figure that out until you've figured out what the correct frame of reference is, and looked at your obsrevations in a new light. Well strictly speaking, it wasn't wrong. It explained the observations perfectly well. What a heliocentric description brought was a simpler description that illuminated the principles behind it, in a way that enabled us to discover the inverse-square law of gravity, link that to Gauss's theorem for gravitation, explain it even from a more fundamental geometric perspective with general relativity, etc.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  It was wrong in the sense that epicycles are an entirely imaginary math artefact, and reality works on different principles. Revolutions happen when a new mental model - or frame of reference, or whatever you want to call it - can generate new kinds of math. The old model is certainly wrong in the sense that it's not a good picture of how reality actually works. If you really want to, you can still use epicycles for certain kinds of problem, just as you can use Newtonian physics for basic mechanics. But this is engineering, not physics. These theories are useless for frontier research. They're absolutely wrong in the sense that their lack of completeness means they cannot be used to generate theory[n+1].
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > It was wrong in the sense that epicycles are an entirely imaginary math artefact, and reality works on different principles. How do you distinguish "an entirely imaginary math artifact" from the "principles" that "reality works on"? (Hint: planetary orbits are not ellipses once you take GR effects into account.)