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# PWA -  Seamless Web

... cite Popper’s ideas. Though basically right as far as they go, these now seem out of date and naive
... **time to take a more definitive look at why - and, of course, when - science is right**⏎
⏎
## https://pitp.phas.ubc.ca/confs/7pines2009/readings/Anderson_darticle.pdf

the jargon of science is being outrageously misused
Nancy Cartwright is a tougher nut to crack - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dappled

two dominant examples chosen are physics and economics

- ... the realisation that the logical structure of modern scientific knowledge is not an evolutionary tree or a pyramid but a multiply-connected web

Physicists search for their ‘theory of everything’, acknowledging that **it will in effect be a theory of almost nothing**, because it would in the end have to leave all of our present theories in place

 detailed consequences of our theories are often **extraordinarily hard to work out** - [MT-complexity](https://knowen.org/nodes/24393)


- Physics is well embedded in the seamless web of cross-relationships which is modern physical science.

Economics, on the other hand, is an example of a field which has not yet achieved **interconnection of enough related information to have real objective validity.** 

- example - My contribution was called ‘It Isn’t Over Till the Fat Lady Sings’

the original BCS paper, which indeed **proposed a ‘model’, and the approximate end of the verification and validation process** which made the model into what physicists properly call the ‘theory’ of phonon-mediated (ordinary, or BCS) superconductivity

 by 1965, into an **enormously flexible instrument with a high degree of a priori predictive power, and even more explanatory power**
 
  it was an **explosive, unifying, cocoon-breaking event. First, in its own field**

- Rather, each is searching for understanding

Of course, in some sense there is always an aspect of prediction

- On crucial matters she is a social constructionist.

- ‘decoherence’ which describes the process that used to be called ‘collapse of the wave function’. The concept is now experimentally verified 

[not right - MT - see Leggett's arguments](https://knowen.org/nodes/26504?path=1-24392-26068-26072-26063-26504)

- Another key word missing from the index and from the book - I checked - is renormalisation

-  it is time scientists themselves examined epistemology in the light of their experience of the reality of scientific discovery

**Gell-Mann has emphasised the role of ‘compression’, while Wilson (1998) proposes the term ‘consilience’ for the web of interrelationships**


## web versus daapled world - links versus points - [PageRank](https://knowen.org/nodes/24422) as well as [Gossamer-private](https://knowen.org/nodes/26654)


## https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf

# Parents

* Philip A. Anderson