“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” — Albert Einstein
“The models are skillful when it comes to the 20th-century trends over the decades… I could go through a dozen more examples… And we can get a good match to the data… Models are not right or wrong; they’re always wrong. They’re always approximations…if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, But unfortunately, observations of the future are not available at this time.”– Gavin Schmidt
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5 responses to “One Of These Guys Is A Scientist”
But it was Arthur Eddington’s photos taken of the 1919 total solar eclipse that proved Einstein’s statement that light is affected by gravity.
IOW, an experiment confirmed Einstein’s claim. There’s yet to be a fully-verified experiment that contradicts Einstein. While that experiment may happen someday, for now I’m putting my money on Einstein.
To be a patent office employee in Berne in the summer of 1905.
A simulation doesn’t even count as an experiment. It’s just a computer crunching a pile of numbers to find a numerical solution to an equation that one hopes accurately resembles a physical system.
So many sources of error. Anything from truncation errors in the matrix inversions to the model being just plain wrong, or at least not valid over the range in question.
I’ve seen simulations of what should have been a simple system to simulate go completely off the rails and produce chaotic garbage.
I’d put my money on Einstein as the scientist. Read what Schmidt said elsewhere and was, as the Brits would say, “gobsmacked”.
Maybe he should take up writing fantasy fiction (and admitting it).
David Hume well explained the problem of induction. Karl Popper well explained the only role of science – as a means of falsification. Today however, the dead philosophers are forgotten and men once again proclaim their varied religious causes as science. The only truth science can give is an individual and pragmatic one. Take away the ‘individual’ part and you have faith, take away the ‘pragmatic’ part and you have dogma.
“The only truth science can give is an individual and pragmatic one.”
My irony meter just exploded. Individual and pragmatic truths aren’t scientific, they’re the metaphysical equivalent of shoe size. Very personal, but meaningless in the larger scheme of things.
There still are many working scientists. There are also people in lab coats calling press conferences to announce the latest emergency about to doom us all. The Venn diagram of the intersection of these two groups is vanishingly small.
As Karl Popper defined scientific objectivism;
there is one reality and our senses report on it more or less accurately.(The senses include scientific instruments, which are ultimately reporting through human senses) This is the axiomatic basis of any scientific investigation. If there isn’t a unified, “Real” reality repeatable experiments are meaningless, you can get any result you can imagine. (extreme Copenhagenists aside…)
Also, not to be confused with Randian objectivism. Ones I know would substitute “perfect accuracy” for “more or less accurate” in the above. That’s taking it too far, and is easily falsifiable.