Post #4139133

@malte@radikal.social @juergen_hubert@mementomori.social Can you have competing scientific theories in your definition? You can. You rarely have two theories that make exactly the same predictions. You often find that the differences are in things that are really hard to build experiments for (a lot of recent decades of physics has been about that: all of the things where the experiments are easy to do are fairly settled). It's fairly common to find that there are a few different models that all have the same behaviour in the common cases and make different predictions in outlying cases. There is one special case, which Occam's Razor covers. If two theories provide the same set of predictions but one requires a superset of the things of the other, you should disregard the additional elements. This is because you can take any theory that provides useful predictions and add other irrelevant factors and create an infinite number of theories that make the same predictions. This doesn't mean that the more complex theories are wrong, it means that the additional factors are not providing useful information. If, at some point in the future, you come up with an experiment that would give different outcomes for the variants, you can add them back. Newton's Laws are not a good example here because they are known to be wrong, they're kept around because they're useful. For anything much bigger than an atom or smaller than a moon (and slower than a satellite), the measurement errors that you get are likely to be much bigger than the errors from Newton's formulae. But the way in which they are wrong is very different for big things and small things. You can't predict the behaviour of electrons with general relativity and you can't predict the behaviour of gas giants with quantum mechanics. So there are a lot of attempts to build theories that work at both scales and then run experiments to attempt to falsify them.