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by lotharbot
4501 days ago
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> "Occam's razor ... dictates that we declare this to be not true" Note that Occam's razor does not actually have the authority to dictate anything. Occam's razor is a useful heuristic -- like frames of reference, you may treat it (or various similar heuristics) as true, but may also treat it as not true. ---- This whole exchange reminds me of one of my favorite Asimov essays, The Relativity of Wrong [0]. You can certainly make the argument that the reference frame "the earth goes around the sun" is not true, but it's less not-true than "the sun goes around the earth". "The earth goes around the sun" is a correct assessment of the relative behavior of the bodies in a reference frame which is in a sense arbitrary, while "the sun goes around the earth" is an incorrect assessment of the relative behavior of those bodies under either Euclidian or relativistic reference frames. [0] http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm |
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