5 ms·
notably a surprising number of his predictions are how current concepts are wrong, and not that new concepts exist. yet most of the discoveries of the past, DN
by glofish 6y ago
notably a surprising number of his predictions are how current concepts are wrong, and not that new concepts exist.
yet most of the discoveries of the past, DNA, semiconductors, relativity have nothing to do with prior information being wrong,
just that prior knowledge was incomplete or insufficiently accurate.
- ChefboyOG 6y agoI had the same initial reaction, but I think it's because the first section of predictions (his cosmology section) only enumerates things that might be wrong, which makes a strong impression. The predictions that best satisfy my intuition's classifier (not exactly a scientific process) are the ones that suggest an expanding of our current knowledge through the discovery of some new, fundamental thing—like a new piece of quantum mechanics, a new systems-level understanding of neural activity, new life forms that evolve our models of life, etc.
- georgeecollins 6y agoI think that is because he can't tell you what the new idea is, but suggest the old ideas the new idea might replace. So relativity replaced aether. Some new idea could maybe replace dark matter, but he can't know what it is.
- dredmorbius 6y agoMichelson-Morley categorically refuted and falsified the aether hypothesis. DNA was confirmation of and predicted by the inheritence component of natural selection. Relativity invalidated fixed- and universal-frames-of-reference models of mechanics. New models imply falsification or rejection of prior models. Semiconductors were more an emergent materials-properties discovery, though with analogues in earlier systems (diodes, vacuum tubes, physical gates and valves, etc.). Not so much a model as a discovered behaviour.