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factoids versus facts



What a coincidence; The New York Times of today (the Magazine section,
page 32) has description of the term factoid. Here is what they write:

.... The oid suffix, rooted in the Greek for "shape", creates a noun or
adjective meaning "similar but not the same; having the characteristics
of." A factoid, coined in 1973 by Norman Mailer, is an imagined or
simulated fact.

I am sorry of confusing the term "factoid" with the "experimental fact".

Tycho Brahe was a collector of experimental facts, not factoids. But I
think that a more profound confusion is possible when one is saying that
an "imagined fact" = "a simulated fact". A scientific simulation is not
the same thing as an artistic imagination (animation, etc.).

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Physical reality does not have to agree with our ideas. But in physics
our ideas must agree with that reality. Otherwise it is not physics.

Ludwik Kowalski kowalskiL@alpha.montclair.edu, MS at MSU, New Jersey
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