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At 7:48 PM -0700 8/19/00, John Denker wrote:
Science is not serial. It is a very high-dimensional tangled latticework
of facts. There is no natural ordering of the facts.
I think this view is the one that we want to get across to our students;
it is certainly my own view. Science is not serial. The one thing John
has omitted here is that this tangled latticework is *self consistent*,
and that this consistency is demonstrable *mathematically*. This view
of Nature permits us to sort the nodes of our latticework to find the few
that are not quite consistent with the others, and we tend to prune the
latticework (discard new nodes inconsistent with the greater structure)
to preserve this consistency. ....