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What part of basic chemistry is fundamentally reliable? I would be interested in seeing an example; it would help me understand what your notion of “reliable” i
by klodolph 7y ago
What part of basic chemistry is fundamentally reliable? I would be interested in seeing an example; it would help me understand what your notion of “reliable” is. My personal experience is that there is lots of hand-waving in chemistry.
- orwin 7y ago> My personal experience Well this the point. Personnal experience is flawed and unreliable. In my personnal experience, something that weight more should fall faster. This is not the case. Which economic theory enuce clearly the subset of conditions required to be true and fit the refutability criterion? For chemistry: all of them.
- klodolph 7y ago> For chemistry: all of them. Humor me… can you give a more specific example? When I took chemistry classes I don’t remember learning a theory that was completely correct, but it has been a while.
- close04 7y agoI think the distinction is between hard and soft sciences. Hard sciences like chemistry, physics, mathematics are very reliable. Barring some very special cases (where an explanation hasn't been found yet) identical conditions will produce identical results. So they're not only reproducible but you can use one to deduce the other. Soft science like economics, psychology, sociology will have none of the 2: conditions vary, results vary, and even if you could ensure you start with absolutely identical conditions it's very implausible that the result won't be heavily influenced later on by random factors.