Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Thursday 2 April 2015

The best ideas...

"Another idea is simplicity, or theoretical frugality, sometimes referred to as Ockham’s Razor. But given the enormous successes of string theory, it becomes clear that the best scientific theories should be as complicated as possible."
http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00108

2 comments:

  1. Hah!   Not even wrong!   Reference [8] says string theory leads to the obvious conclusion that it is strings all the way down and not turtles   ...questions like “what would happen if Spiderman fought Superman?”, since this involves combining the Marvel Multiverse with the DC Multiverse.   Thus we should assume Occam here.  This principle, that if something has strong merit, then you want to make it as powerful as possible, is sometimes called ‘Occam’s Laser’.

    And having read ’Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid’ - over and over again - like I am in some kind of strange loop,  I can confirm strings also cover the situation mentioned at the end of "Falsifiability"  that Proposition A dioes lead to Proposition B, and  Proposition B always states “Proposition A is itself a theory”.  Just as it says on this note I have to "look on other side"...which says ...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hmmm...two of the authors are themselves F-words.  "And they vanished in a puff of logic."

    ReplyDelete

Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.

Philosophers be like, "?"

In the Science of Discworld books the authors postulate Homo Sapiens is actually Pan Narrans, the storytelling ape. Telling stories is, the...