The idea that we have faith in everyday matters is not new. This secular faith is practiced by, well, everybody, since we rely on a sort of faith that our senses do not deceive us in perceiving the world around us. This sense of secular faith is no less apparent (and certainly no less important!) in the sciences. Indeed, we have some amount or other of faith in each step of the “process” for a given experiment, which we exercise quite unconsciously.
Faith in Theory
It’s been said before that a scientific theory is a sort of story which we tell ourselves to makes sense of some set of (presumably repeatable) data. Well and good. But what reason do we have to believe that our “story” describes reality—and especially, that it holds true anytime, anywhere? What reason do we have to believe that it really describes the natural world as it is?
It is worth noting here that a great many theories—at least in physics—begin with any number of assumptions. There is a joke that physics never works in real life because most objects aren’t spheres and very few of us actually live in a vacuum. We often, moreover, ignore any number of “small” interactions when deriving our formulas [1], which interactions may not actually be ignorable, and may play a large or a small part in any given interaction; these interactions may or may not be separable from the particular interaction or effect in which our theory takes some interest.
Read the rest on the IGNITUM TODAY site.
0 comments:
Post a Comment