User:Eric Baird/scrap2
A scientific hypothesis is a potential explanation, or reductive description, of effects and how they relate to one another.
| “ | “Now I'm going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it ... no, don’t laugh, that’s the truth. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see ... if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. | ” |
| — Richard Feynman, Scientific Method 1964 | ||
The creation of a (testable) hypothesis is part of the scientific method.
The task of creating a good scientific hypothesis is made more difficult by various factors:
- "All the good ones are taken" syndrome – "obvious" hypotheseses are likely to have already been made by someone else.
- "Nobody teaches this stuff" – not entirely true (see Feynman), but a teaching syllabus naturally tends to focus on developing conformity rather than rebellion.
- Industrialisation of research – research is an industry, with standardised methods and tools.
While it would be an exaggeration to say that you can't teach independent thinking,
the ability to find alternative systems usually involves
see relationships that everyone else has missed is, by definition, not something that one tends to learn by internalisign the same standard syllabus that everybody else has read.
Craziness
Science versus mathematics
| “ | (computers) ... are useless. They can only give you answers. | ” |
| — Pablo Picasso | ||
Mathematics has its own version of the scientific hypothesis - the unproven theorem. However, in mathematical physics, the idea of guessing physical results of behaviours is often considered to be exactly what a "good mathematician is NOT supposed to do. Culturally,
