Politics & Science: Aryan Physics

When your scientific theory runs into trouble, either it's unable to explain certain things that were observed, or it just gave false predictions with regards to what you were supposed to observe, you generally have two options. You can 1) modify/expand your theory - so that it accomodates to the newly gathered data; or you 2) reject it and adopt a new one.

Introduction: The Discovery of Neptune

It's never completely obvious which option one ought to choose. For example, in 1821 French astronomer Alexis Bouvard published tables of the orbit of Uranus, making predictions of future positions of the planet based on Newton's laws of motion and gravitation (Bouvard 1821). However, subsequent observations revealed his predictions to be wrong - his tables were substantially off from what was actually observed.

Introduction to the Scientific Realism Debate

This post is a short introduction to two influential arguments in the scientific realism debate (basically this is a transcription of the attached video):

When you think about the world, at some point you have to ask yourself – what to make of science and the supposed body of knowledge it has acquired?

Is science merely a very successful tool for controlling nature, but says nothing about the underlying structure of the world? Or do certain scientific theories at least to some degree capture the actual truth?

The answer to this question determines how you are going to view the mind, think about language and talk about the metaphysics of space and time. Where you’re going to position scientific beliefs in your philosophical system, will have a significant effect on it.

The most commonly held view (at least by people in general) is that yes, scientific theories do tell us the truth, even if it’s just an approximation of what the world is actually like. We call this view scientific realism, which normally consists of the claim that:

1. “Our best scientific theories about the world are approximately true – an approximation of what the world is actually like."

Occam's razor (and why we use it)

This post provides an explanation of Occam's razor and why we use it - again, it's basically a transcription of a video that I made a couple of months ago (feel free to check it out):



Suppose you hear a vase break.

You go to the living room and there's little Jimmy, next to the broken vase. He says that a cat did it.

But you don't even have a cat in this household.

So, Jimmy says, some cat must have sneaked in from the outside.

You remember closing all the windows and doors.

So, he says, it must have entered the house before you closed them.