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Old 11-10-2011, 01:58 PM
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Dave2042 (Dave)
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: Newtown, Sydney, Australia
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"Results that have withstood the test of experiment will continue to remain valid, no matter how physical theory evolves."

This is, I think, one of the most important and poorly understood (by non-scientists) concepts in science, so it's nice to see it said so clearly.

I've had several weird conversations over the years (and seen writing along the same lines) with people who can't seem to see the difference between falsifiability (a structural feature of a theory that allows it to be tested against experiment) and falsification (an experiment actually contradicting a theory).

The worst was someone who had started from the observation that gravity as an attractive force is falsifiable and then concluded that it is entirely plausible that someone might do an experiment tomorrow which demonstrates it isn't. This wasn't a subtle point about dark energy or MOND or the like, or a theoretical point about epistemology. It was a straight-out insistence that an advance can simply invalidate all previous results.
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