[sgt101]

History : Dun Scotus (really) probably invented Ockham's razor - William was his student and used it to avoid the thing that all medieval philosophers needed to avoid, namely being tied up and put on a bonfire.

Why did Dun invent it (probably)… well here's the thing, Christianity has a God with three faces, son, father and holy ghost thing. Why? The answer is - don't multiply entities beyond necessity, so God has the number of faces necessary to do the job, no more, no less.

I'm wittering on because this is where that heuristic came from, literally it's angels on pins stuff. So don't invest in it, I'd bet a bit that if we got Dun and Bill together with a few pints of mead they'd laugh themselves silly to here that 21st Century physics pins any weight onto their measure.

The Greeks wouldn't have, the Chinese didn't, why do we?

[c1ccccc1]

I mean, we still call it Occam's razor, but I don't think that it's really even the same principle by this point, it just shares the same name. In science today, we don't really care about the number of entities. We don't reject the idea that the stars are suns like our own just because that would imply that the number of atoms in the universe is drastically larger than the number of atoms in the solar system. Instead of hypotheses with the least number of entities, we favour hypotheses with the smallest Kolmogorov complexity. [1] As a slogan for the modern version, I like the phrasing by John Von-Neumann: "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity [2] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-fit-an-elep...

[comex]

Nitpick: The historical problem with stars being suns wasn't (just) the universe being larger than the solar system, but that the telescopic observations available at the time seemed to imply that every other visible star would have to be much larger than the Sun, in fact larger than the orbit of Saturn. This was because early astronomers didn't understand optical diffraction and thought the Airy disks visible around stars were the stars themselves, making their angular radius in Earth's sky seem vastly larger than the reality. [1] Both characterization of the Airy disk and observation of stellar parallax didn't occur until the 19th century, by which point religious objections wouldn't have had the same status as in Galileo's day anyway (for example, Darwin's work was published only a few decades later).

Source: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.612...

[chongli]

You ought to read a little bit into the history of astronomy, particularly planetary motion. If the ancient Greeks had applied Occam's razor then we would've abandoned geocentrism long before Copernicus.

We should've listened to (and built on) Aristarchus of Samos instead of Ptolemy's deferent/epicycle contraption. All of this because everyone wanted to hang on to Plato's assertion that the heavens obeyed the mathematical beauty of circular forms.

[rudolfwinestock]

Although it's attributed to him, William of Ockham did not come up with Occam's Razor.

My metaphysics teacher showed me a line in the Summa Contra Gentiles where St. Thomas Aquinas enunciated the same idea behind the Razor almost a hundred years before Ockham did. Sorry, I don't have the reference handy. Furthermore, the Wikipedia article on Ockham's Razor traces the basic idea all the way back to Aristotle's Posterior Analytics.

[AlexCoventry]

Occam's razor has a practical interpretation in Bayesian statistics, in that a more complex hypothesis will tend to have exponentially lower prior probability, because in comes from a more heavily parametrized component of the hypothesis space.

That doesn't mean much without a concrete probability model, though, and there probably isn't one in this case.