News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by advisedwang on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @11:55AM (#50368348)
Kepler did understand the data he had, where it came from, what his laws were claiming, how to verify that the data fits the laws, how the data dis-proves heliocentricity etc, which is really what the article is talking about.
Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by hocusPokeUs on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @12:29PM (#50368773)
This is just going to devolve into more tribal elders pontificating to be possessed of knowledge the average person won't be able or allowed to falsify; the expert can clearly see how their interpretation is correct and it's disrespectful to challenge elders nonsense

Tao and such are merely biological beings serving biological imperative to survive. Educated as they are they are well aware social society expects them to engage in knowledge role-play to barter for food

The recursive non-fractal nature of reality where "function exits" when a human dies naturally fosters signal attenuation and the formation of new spoken traditions among the future generations

There is no propagating our social ways 100 years into the future. We can only propagate our material outputs. The semantics we define to describe something are lost to time.

The provenance to future people was past people; that's all that matters in the future not how we communicated together now

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by VikingCoder on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:10PM (#50369345)
> how to verify that the data fits the laws

What? He worked meticulously to match the observations.

I don't understand your claim here at all.

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by throw0101c on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:43PM (#50369788)
Kepler's models showed that the planets travelling in elliptical orbits matched observations, but Ptolemaic (and Brahe, etc) also produced models that (tried to) match observation.

If Kepler's models explained the how and why, why were Newton and Einstein necessary?

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by whatshisface on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @02:13PM (#50370177)
Newtonian mechanics doesn't explain the why of itself, it explains why Kepler's laws are true, an explanation that won't make sense if you don't know what Kepler's laws are saying, and which won't hold any significance to you if you don't know why Kepler's laws are thought to be true.
Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by dfabulich on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @02:59PM (#50370708)
Newton and Einstein answered "how" questions with more generality and more precision.

Kepler's model predicted the behavior of the planets, and so does Newton's model, too, but Newton's model is more general, applying not only to planets, but also to other objects with mass.

Einstein's model is more accurate and precise than Newton's model, especially about the orbit of Mercury. Einstein's model also predicts gravitational lensing (e.g. during eclipses), which Newton's model doesn't.

"Why" questions are very hard for physicists. Generally, when we ask "why" questions, we're asking what prior Event X caused Event Y. But for universal laws, there is no prior event that caused the universal law to be true. The best we get is more generality. Planets orbit the sun for the same reason apples fall to the earth, but we don't know why gravity happens, only how. Magnets resist each other for the same reason the floor is hard, but we don't know why magnetism happens, only how.

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by throw0101c on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @03:48PM (#50371284)
> "Why" questions are very hard for physicists.

Yup:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by colonwqbang on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @04:59PM (#50372138)
On this topic: Feynman "Why do magnets work?"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by bpshaver on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @04:15PM (#50371638)
Weren't Kepler's models worse at prediction, at first? We adopted them because they were more parsimonious.