Re:When scientific orthodoxy resembles religious dogma
by bobthechef on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @10:06PM
(#27298546)
I would mentioned the Duhem-Quine thesis here. The notion of a "critical experiment" is generally quite naive in the grand scheme of things. Parsimonious perhaps, but any falsifying experiment tests not merely the theory under consideration, but all human knowledge, as it were.
Yes, the discoveries Galileo announced from his telescope also touched off an interesting set of debates about whether or not his observation of sunspots and craters on the Moon were actually real features on those bodies, or just artifacts of the telescope itself. Those debates are still with us today in a more general form. Anytime we use instruments to observe something, we have to be careful to make sure that we are observing something in the outside universe rather than an artifact of the instrument itself.