Re: Examples of Coincidence as Misleading Explanation

On Fri, 10 Mar 2006 06:28:00 -0500, Rich Sondheim
<sondheim74@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I was wondering if anyone could give me one or more good examples
where, in the history of physics, coincidence was mistakenly accepted
as a legitimate explanation for a phenomenon that ended up not being
the least bit coincidental --- or a phenomenon was simply ignored
because it did not conform to the generally accepted theory.

Yours was a good question. I was hoping for more answers than have
appeared.

I did run across this example.
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Eddington.html
Eddington cooked up pseudoscientific "proofs" on "physical" grounds
that the fine structure constant alpha was exactly 1/136. When
experiments yielded a more accurate value, Eddington produced another
proof...

Not a very good example since his original theory was not widely
accepted. N rays ( http://mikeepstein.com/path/nrays.html) might
provide a better example but that's only a possible hint.

Your question smacks of a bias in the Anthropic Principle debate.
http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0407213 vs
http://xyz.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0407266
Many versions of Anthropic Principle conclusions undoubtably propose
that certain physical constants could only be just so because of a
selection process or result. (when is an anthropic result a
cooincidence?) Later, it is likely many of these will be explained by
a feature of the theoretical structure which explains their value.
(which came first, the mass of the electron or the four fermion
coupling constant?) Aka, which is the value explained by theory,
which is the result of coincidence?

John
.

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