Re:The Limits of Science
by username90 on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @06:16AM
(#21333082)
If you create new mathematics in order to properly describe a physics phenomena then you are doing science. Similarly if you create a laboratory in order to properly conduct physics experiments to verify your theories you are doing science. How the laboratory was built matters a lot for the experiment, the same as how the math language was built.
Math is a tool, yes, but it is a tool that is very useful to do science in and the act of creating and distributing a tool you use to do science is a large part of science. A shower on the other hand has no direct relationship to science, you don't need to be a physicist to make a shower, it is just a commodity. Calculus however needed to be discovered by a physicist as the math was too strange for mathematicians to find but simple enough that two different physicists found it in parallel.
So a shower is science if the warm water inspires someone to come up with a new theory? That is a terrible place to draw the boundary; it opens up a can of semantic worms about what 'using' means. Major scientific results that are most easily expressed using calculus can be derived using processes other than calculus.
> The problem with the data first approach you are advocating for is that it almost never results in a good explanation
Science doesn't provide good explanations at the best of times. I'll willingly bet not 1 engineer in 100 can explain gravity. We just know if we measure mass we get predictive estimates of velocity. That isn't an explanation; that is reliable magic. In fact there have been a couple of centuries where even the scientists were basically just plotting data and curve fitting.