The best physicists use the “many weak arguments” approach at least sometimes. See my post on Euler and the Basel Problem for an example of this sort of thing. (Nowadays, physicists fall into the Eulerian tradition more than mathematicians do.)
A close friend who’s a general relativity theorist has told me that the best physicists rely primarily on many weak arguments.
Hmm, I think I may be misunderstanding what you mean by “many weak arguments.” As in, I don’t think it’s uncommon for physicists to make multiple arguments in support of a proposition, but even each of those arguments, IME, are strong enough to bet at least a year of one’s career on (eg the old arguments for renormalization), by contrast with, say, continental drift, where you probably wouldn’t be taken seriously if you’d produced merely one or two lines of evidence. What this shares with the “one strong argument” position is that we’re initially looking for a sufficiently convincing argument, discarding lines of though that would lead to insufficiently strong arguments. It’s different mostly in that we go back and find more arguments “to be extra sure,” but you’re still screening your arguments for sufficient strongness as you make them.
Though admittedly, as a student, I may be biased towards finding my professors’ arguments more convincing than they ought to be.
The best physicists use the “many weak arguments” approach at least sometimes. See my post on Euler and the Basel Problem for an example of this sort of thing. (Nowadays, physicists fall into the Eulerian tradition more than mathematicians do.)
A close friend who’s a general relativity theorist has told me that the best physicists rely primarily on many weak arguments.
Hmm, I think I may be misunderstanding what you mean by “many weak arguments.” As in, I don’t think it’s uncommon for physicists to make multiple arguments in support of a proposition, but even each of those arguments, IME, are strong enough to bet at least a year of one’s career on (eg the old arguments for renormalization), by contrast with, say, continental drift, where you probably wouldn’t be taken seriously if you’d produced merely one or two lines of evidence. What this shares with the “one strong argument” position is that we’re initially looking for a sufficiently convincing argument, discarding lines of though that would lead to insufficiently strong arguments. It’s different mostly in that we go back and find more arguments “to be extra sure,” but you’re still screening your arguments for sufficient strongness as you make them.
Though admittedly, as a student, I may be biased towards finding my professors’ arguments more convincing than they ought to be.