Karl Popper is an idiot.

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The man starts with a misunderstanding of how science is always done.

You start with a hypothesis, if your work cannot move past this stage it dies until you reformulate a new hypothesis, etc. and so on. Once a hypothesis can be tested and the results agree with observation it moves into the realm of theory.

Keep it simple. Learn Greek culture from which ALL modern science and philosophy springs, and you can forget Nuvo Marxist bull that flows regularly out of modern Europe.

Falsifiability need not apply.

Karl Popper has one of the best understandings of science of all the so-called philosophers of science. He successfully defined the boundary between science and nonsense like psychology, economics, sociology etc. etc.

He demonstrated that no scientific theory is provable in the sense that a mathematical proposition is provable. At best a scientific hypothesis has not yet been shown to be false by empirical means.

Of all the philosophers of science Popper is most respected by working physicists.

ruveyn

Popper was also respected by one of my colleagues - the political one with near zero content.

Which I do not take to be Popper's fault - she would have respected anybody whose name was on the "in" list, regardless of point.

I will lay before you the following propositions:

A. Reality is

B. Reality is too big to grasp

C. Some of us are driven to approach the asymptote as closely as we can.

D. To the working Thinker in science, Popper, Occam, the "Method", all that stuff is relevant ONLY to the degree that conforming to the norm makes your paper more likely to be published and your research more likely to be funded. But you will keep plugging published or not, funded or not because you gotta.

Greek culture? It was the Renaissance's dumping of Aristotle's BS that allowed us this tec revolution, so no.

The first statement is true, but is true for most philosophers of science, if only because if they understood, then they wouldn't be so fallible.

The second issue.... gets into question, as if certain things are predicted, then that would seem to suggest that comparatively, certain things are not predicted, so.... why couldn't a person work from the unpredicted items to falsify?

Your third statement seems stupid to me. Popper wasn't a Marxist. Many of the major Greek ideas are wrong and really need to be tossed aside as quickly as possible.

The fourth statement seems too simplistic. In order for a theory to work, there have to be certain incompatible ideas with it, and that Popperian insight is a good one. Note: Popper's philosophy of science also fits into his solution to the problem of induction, which is at minimum clever, so I am not really predisposed to a quick rejection of Popper. Particularly given that I think your mindset is ignoring the relevance of the problem of induction to science.

But Plato and Pythagoras soldiered on.

Mathematics and Theoretical Physics are well within the boundaries of the Pythagorean program.

ruveyn

Many Greeks were right . But our overconfidence on Aristotle was shiot, specially because he disagreed with the Greeks that turned out to be right.

Anyway, in regards of scientific facts and also math, many Greeks were useful. But if we talk about science itself then it is Aristotle that defined how his science should be and it took us a lot of time to modernize it into what we have now.

I dare say the Greeks were useful. The Greek philosophers from the time of Thales and onward invented the theorem. Axiomatic mathematics is the greatest of the Greek contributions.

ruveyn

Okay, I'll look into him further. But my gut is telling me something is fishy about this guy.

He's flawed, as most philosophers are, but he's not fishy from what I tell, and a lot of people I respect, or who I know to have said things worthy of respect, respect Karl Popper. I myself think he's very intelligent, even though his efforts in philosophy of science have been rejected on good grounds. One thing that you DO have to realize is that Popper's scientific idea is VERY RELATED to his solution to the problem of induction. If you don't recognize this, it may be hard to understand where he is coming from.

What is fishy about Popper. The following is a fact: Induction is not a universally valid way of reaching a true conclusion from true premises. Some inductive generalizations (however plausible) are just plain wrong. Whereas we never, ever get to false conclusion from true premises. Valid deductive reasoning is truth-preserving.

A scientific theory can never be proved absolutely to be valid. No matter how successful it has been in the past it just might be possible to run into a fact (in nature) that falsifies it. Why is this? Because we cannot verify the theory to be so everywhere and every-when. The idea that physical laws never change is a convenient assumption, not an established fact. Scientific theories are at best provisionally true and held to be true until such time as a particular fact falsifies them.

ruveyn

According to legend, the Pythagoreans killed the man who discovered irrational numbers because they considered it blasphemous.

That is just a story. According to legend Pythagoreans would not eat certain kinds of beans because the were shaped like human beans. There are all sorts of strange stories told about Pythagoras and his followers.

The point is that he (and later Plato) believed in the actual literal existence of certain abstract objects and the reality of abstract mathematical laws. In later times Mathematicians and Theoretical Physicists devote substantial portions of their lives to discovering and studying abstract entities which they regard to be as real as rain if not more so. Everything theoretical mathematician and physicist that ever lived is a closet Platonist.

ruveyn

What do you guys think of this view taken to it's extreme as in Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis:


http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/070 ... 0646v2.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematic ... hypothesis

I found this interesting:

We discuss the nature of reality in the ontological context of Penrose’s math-matter-mind triangle. The triangle suggests the circularity of the widespread view that math arises from the mind, the mind arises out of matter, and that matter can be explained in terms of math. Non-physicists should be wary of any claim that modern physics leads us to any particular resolution of this circularity, since even the sample of three theoretical physicists writing this paper hold three divergent views. Some physicists believe that current physics has already found the basic framework for a complete description of reality, and only has to fill in the details. Others suspect that no single framework, from physics or other sources, will ever capture reality. Yet others guess that reality might be approached arbitrarily closely by some form of future physics, but probably based on completely different frameworks. We will designate these three approaches as the fundamentalist, secular and mystic views of the world, as seen by practicing physicists. We present and contrast each of these views, which arguably form broad categories capturing most if not all interpretations of physics. We argue that this diversity in the physics community is more useful than an ontological monoculture, since it motivates physicists to tackle unsolved problems with a wide variety of approaches.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0 ... 0188v2.pdf

Sounds like typically universal evolution of problem solving to me. It's a very natural approach to solving any issue. Different minds, different philosophies with different approaches to the same problem. The universe has been doing that since about what maybe 5 billion years ago? Maybe longer if you include galactic formation. Approach from a new angle and get a different result, still looks like a galaxy but it's not going to be cookie cutter.

So, avoid cookie cutter science is the key there eh? Non traditional thinking is what the users of this forum do best.