Re: Baghdad

On May 27, 1:08 pm, Richard Herring <junk@[127.0.0.1]> wrote:

Not by any means accepted by all scientists:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=533
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/testable.pdf

Those who do accept them as scientific do so on the basis that they make
predictions which can in principle be tested, but we currently lack the
engineering resources to make the required measurements. That's a very
different situation from your just-so stories.

Sooner or later pretty much every hypothesis can be tested.
But what about a hypothesis for which a test will come about
in thousand years? There was a test of the string theories:
one of the enrolled dimensions could in principle be one
millimeter across, and this size could be measured,
but the test failed, so this can mean: either all enrolled
dimensions are smaller than one mm across, or the
spring theories are wrong.

A criterion which puts the cart before the horse: it conveniently
overlooks whether something actually qualifies to be called a theory at
all.

Phlogiston was a respectable theory in its time,
but it was not fecund, it was not productive,
it didn't lead any further, whereas the idea
of oxygen led further, it was productive, it was
fecund. I mean this by my criterium.

... and are therefore consistent with the existing mathematics ...

No, but they might be truly mathematical, a very different thing.

Astrology doesn't lead to new mathematical methods
(it did in a long bygone past, when astrology and
astronomy were interlinked), and so astrology (in our
time) is not scientific, but string theory that led to
a plethora of new mathematical tools _is_ scientific,
at least in my opinion.

.

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