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Hi all-
Kyle writes:
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Surely the thing that ultimately makes physics better than pyramidology (or
any other purely verbal description of the world) is the fact that we can
quantify things. In my experience it is very important to give students
(science and non-science) some idea that the concepts we use are proven to
be valid by experimentation which means connecting the real world to
numbers. Otherwise students approach the whole process the same way they
approach learning latin verbs. We are not guessing at the concepts here (or
making them up from nothing), they are not arbitrary; we are justified in
saying that we KNOW to such and such percent accruacy that theory X is true.
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While I don't want to get into the "how much math?" argument, I take
exception the the last clause: "we are justified...is true."
We never know that a theory "is true". The best that we can ever say
in support of a theory is that it makes predictions using a limited set of
arbitrary constants, within some limited range of prediction, for some limited
set of phenomena. That is why the word "model" has become fashionable, rather
than "theory".
I think of the practice of physics as the business of testing the ranges
of validity of available models.
Regards,
Jack