| > Everything you said is necessary for generating the most accurate model, but - and correct me if I am wrong here - they are all there to support that final goal. I don't want to sound like I'm arguing solely to argue, but if your thesis was correct, the Ptolemaic system could have been tuned repeatedly for greater and greater agreement with reality, but without ever reconsidering the basis of the model, the underlying theory. History records that we instead abandoned the Ptolematic theory, even though it "worked" and would have been perfectly satisfactory by way of refinements, to support modern astrodynamics. But instead we stopped generating more and more accurate (and complex) models and replaced the entire structure. It was the same with the ether theory -- after difficulties with the theory arose in the late 19th century, instead of "saving the ether" (an actual expression used at the time), we abandoned the entire structure -- this time 20 years in advance of any plausible replacement, which turned out to be relativity. And relativity turned out to be a much better theory in all respects, even though that wasn't obvious at the time. This is getting into a complex area, one having to do with the law of parsimony (a.k.a Occam's razor) and theoretical elegance, but science isn't about the most accurate model, it is also about beauty and parsimony alongside accurate modeling. |
Actually, science is about the most accurate model, but it turns out that what we mean by "beauty," is actually about simplicity, and thus about correctness.
There is a sound mathematical background behind simplicity and its likelihood of being correct, as outlined in Scott Aaranson's paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.1791