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 Though basically right as far as they go, these now seem out of date and naive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
- 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
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