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Andrew Daw Says:

May 17th, 2007 at 3:30 am

But then, just sometimes, some radical thinking in science happens to work.

So you can jump, say, from a Ptolemaic earth centred universe to a Copernican sun centred scheme or from the theory that you can alloy or chemically combine stuff together to make gold to discovering how it can’t be done.

Then seriously suppose (if you dare) the radical thought that quantum gravity theorists are the modern alchemists in search of a combination of two theories that will produce the golden theory of everything but when, as a matter of natural fact, it can’t be done.

And then suppose further that there can be no such theory because, in the sense that Richard Feynman meant it, nobody understands quantum mechanics, and that no theory of quantum gravity could be developed whereby you could come to understand quantum mechanics…

May 17th, 2007 at 11:26 am

But then science must in the end be about reasoning concerning the available empirical findings just as such. And sometimes this process can require the rejection of much existing theory because one has found reasons from the findings to consider this theory is based upon fundamentally erroneous assumptions.

May 20th, 2007 at 6:47 am

“But then, just sometimes, some radical thinking in science happens to work.”

‘History tends to disagree with this. The track record for “radical thinking” is notoriously bad…worse than the track record for economists’ empirical predictions being valid! (And *that* is saying something!)’

Surely not, history of physics and science in general tells us that if it wasn’t for ideas that were highly radical in their time (eg those of Copernicus, Gallileo, Newton, Darwin, Lavoisier, Pasteur, Planck, Einstein etc) there would have been no progress at all in understanding how the natural world is the way that it is.

One trouble is that modern scientists can take past discoveries for granted and forget how radical they were, while you can point to instances where conservatism of the major discoverers themselves - let alone of others - probably slowed down progress considerably.

So had not Max Planck been middle aged and so conservatively rooted in 19th century classical physics, instead of spending years trying to refute his own quantum theory, he could have embraced Einstein’s ideas on the photoelectric effect and then, quite possibly, helped to speed up progess towards developing a quantum mechanics.