Infallible proof

[infamous]

What majority percentage must a theory achieve before the concept can be respected as a law or proof? I ask this question because, the verity of proof is only relative to the preponderance of it's intellectual support.

[CraigD]

How much support must a theory have to be a law?
That’s an interesting, complicated question. Are the votes from junior high school students, middle age Math BofSs career IT professionals, recent PhDs in the relevant field, and famous senior scientists given equal weight? What about people who do not consider themselves particularly involved in science? If so, by a simple majority vote, we’d have to consider ESP and Divine intervention physical law, while rejecting Relativity and Quantum mechanics.

Law or proof?
I don’t consider “laws” and “proofs” to be equivalent. A physical law may be empirical, not logically proven from more fundamental laws or postulates. A proven theorem may fall short of the utility or confidence in the truth of its postulates to be considered a law.

I believe use of the term “law” has been declining in scientific conversation and literature, as a more sophisticated scientific community increasingly embraces mathematical formalism, particularly in the 1980s.

[Tormod]

If scientific laws were dictated by a majority consencus, there would be no progress.

If I pose the following question to people: "The Sun is a star, true or false", I think you'd be surprised - probably more than half of the people you ask (from a stastically "correct" subset of the population) would answer "false". Can we then say that we have a scientific law stating that our sun is not a star?

[infamous]

Originally Posted by Tormod

If scientific laws were dictated by a majority consencus, there would be no progress.

If I pose the following question to people: "The Sun is a star, true or false", I think you'd be surprised - probably more than half of the people you ask (from a stastically "correct" subset of the population) would answer "false". Can we then say that we have a scientific law stating that our sun is not a star?

Tormod, I did point out "the verity of proof is only relative to the preponderance of it's intellectual support".

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by infamous

Tormod, I did point out "the verity of proof is only relative to the preponderance of it's intellectual support".

Yeah, I noticed but I must admit I didn't quite manage to quantify what you meant by it. Can you elaborate?

[infamous]

Originally Posted by Tormod

Yeah, I noticed but I must admit I didn't quite manage to quantify what you meant by it. Can you elaborate?

Yes Tormod, I'm referring to those individuals studied in the particular discipline in question.

[infamous]

Originally Posted by CraigD

I believe use of the term “law” has been declining in scientific conversation and literature, as a more sophisticated scientific community increasingly embraces mathematical formalism, particularly in the 1980s.

Yes CraigD I agree, and there may be another reason why the scientific community is less inclined to support new laws. Things are changing so rapidly that they may fear their new law wil soon be superseded by another. This is the reason I asked these questions at the begining of this thread. It's becoming more and more difficult to trust the so-called authorities because things are changing so fast. No sooner does someone find proof for a theory when someone else comes along and overturns it with proof of their own. So what is proof if it can't stand the test of time.

[alxian]

the as long as their peers are able to reproduce the results of the originator of the theorem its like a bill in congress moves up the food chain.

i however love both the fact that this thread points out that jo-everybody is scientifically inept yet they manage to live 70 ought years without mortally injuring themselves.


you have to wonder how the scientific communicate even began and managed to persist amoung the scientifically challenged. i suppose after they stopped burning the scientist and started benfiting from the rewards of technological advancement the public at large got a wee bit smarter.

however with that knowledge and great catastrophes of science comes the burden of ersponsibility.

the people don't mitigate scientific advancement, the try to forstall further catastrophe by limiting research in "dangerous science".

[infamous]

Originally Posted by alxian

the as long as their peers are able to reproduce the results of the originator of the theorem it like a bill in congress moves up the food chain.

There may be some truth to what your saying here. Once a recognized authority speaks the words, he becomes the ventriloquist and the rest of us become the dummies.

Originally Posted by alxian

i however love both the fact that this thread points out that jo-everybody is scientifically inept yet they manage to live 70 ought years without mortally injuring themselves.

That is not the purpose of this thread and I'm sure no one here is trying to make any such points.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by infamous

… Things are changing so rapidly that they may fear their new law wil soon be superseded by another. This is the reason I asked these questions at the begining of this thread. …

You ask a very interesting, thought-provoking question. Physics does seem to be changing at such a pace that both amateurs and professional physicists are hard-pressed keep current, and the possibility of publishing work with that will be read years hence seems increasingly remote.

I bet many theorists secretly wish they’d been born a century earlier, in the time of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, back when physicist could live to see themselves and their work on t-shirts and the lips of every other scientist. IMHO, Gerard 't Hooft is right up there with those guys, and has a physics nobel to prove it, but does he have his own t-shirt? Will people in 2030 say of a smart person “they’re another ‘t Hooft”, or will it still be “another Einstein”?

…So what is proof (if it can't stand the test of time).

(parenthesis mine) Ahh, this is the kind of question that Math students of my generation live for! Proof is simply (well, it’s not all that simple) manipulating an integer representing an unproven theorem according to the rules of its formal system to produce an integer representing a proven theorem or postulate.

Or that’s one definition of a theorem – Godel’s. Not the kind that all that many real scientists or mathematicians use, no matter what they claim. It’s a good one, though.

Even a genuine, formal proof, though, is only as good as its formal system and their postulates.

150 years ago, the idea that finding a formal system that was a good – well perfect, actually - fit for the physical universe would be too difficult seemed pretty far-fetched. Now we know it is. Godel’s incompleteness theorem doesn’t help (well, actually it does – that was just a figure of speech)

Proof’s the (relatively) easy part. It’s the theory – the rules and postulates of the formal system - that’s hard.

Just my opinion, of course.