In reality the Ancient Greek came up with the concept that the earth is round because it’s intuitively true when you look at ships on the horizon. No person from whom you can reasonable say that he was educated to be a scientist was in position to find flatness intuitive.
The second part would be to look at where scientists first disagreed over the shape of the earth. Newton’s theory predicted an bulge on the equator while Descartes theory predicted more of an egg shaped earth.
Both of those camps considered their theory to be true and the point of going out to have the expediction was to prove the other side wrong. Descartes physics made the wrong prediction and people who didn’t like the concept of force at a distance suddenly had to accept Newtons paradigm and discard Descartes physics.
Today we make statements about what we believe happens in the sun without having any tools or techniques to measure what goes on inside of it. We don’t wait for tools or techniques but make predictions based on the physical laws we consider to be true. That’s not much different with how followers of Newton and Descartes came up with their predictions of the shape of the earth.
As a scientist you don’t focus on observations in the absence of theory but attempt to build theories that explain the world.
It’s funny because the way that I read that part, you and Tim are saying the same thing, which is “Progessively commit more to a hypothesis as you have more and more data to prove it.”
“Progessively commit more to a hypothesis as you have more and more data to prove it.”
That sentence is written in the imperative while I haven’t spoken about what people should do but about what they are doing.
“What are scientists doing?” is an empiric question answered by the history and philosophy of science.
Whether or not there such a thing as action at a distance is a big question and people at the time on the continent where confident that there wasn’t and ridiculed people who believed there was action at a distance.
They had just thrown out astrology because they didn’t believe in action at a distance.
But then there were the Englishmen who believed in action at a distance so the French started their 10 year expedition to go and prove them wrong.
If there would have been that big of a disagreement within the two world views than they likely wouldn’t have gone out and invested the effort to settle the question about the shape but would have just went which what their theory predicted.
Interesting, what part about this did you think was flawed?
Multiple parts:
In reality the Ancient Greek came up with the concept that the earth is round because it’s intuitively true when you look at ships on the horizon. No person from whom you can reasonable say that he was educated to be a scientist was in position to find flatness intuitive.
The second part would be to look at where scientists first disagreed over the shape of the earth. Newton’s theory predicted an bulge on the equator while Descartes theory predicted more of an egg shaped earth. Both of those camps considered their theory to be true and the point of going out to have the expediction was to prove the other side wrong. Descartes physics made the wrong prediction and people who didn’t like the concept of force at a distance suddenly had to accept Newtons paradigm and discard Descartes physics.
Today we make statements about what we believe happens in the sun without having any tools or techniques to measure what goes on inside of it. We don’t wait for tools or techniques but make predictions based on the physical laws we consider to be true. That’s not much different with how followers of Newton and Descartes came up with their predictions of the shape of the earth.
As a scientist you don’t focus on observations in the absence of theory but attempt to build theories that explain the world.
It’s funny because the way that I read that part, you and Tim are saying the same thing, which is “Progessively commit more to a hypothesis as you have more and more data to prove it.”
That sentence is written in the imperative while I haven’t spoken about what people should do but about what they are doing. “What are scientists doing?” is an empiric question answered by the history and philosophy of science.
Whether or not there such a thing as action at a distance is a big question and people at the time on the continent where confident that there wasn’t and ridiculed people who believed there was action at a distance. They had just thrown out astrology because they didn’t believe in action at a distance. But then there were the Englishmen who believed in action at a distance so the French started their 10 year expedition to go and prove them wrong.
If there would have been that big of a disagreement within the two world views than they likely wouldn’t have gone out and invested the effort to settle the question about the shape but would have just went which what their theory predicted.