[ExI] Popper and unscientific theories
John Clark
johnkclark at gmail.com
Thu Jun 9 20:08:17 UTC 2016
The philosopher Karl
Popper
said
a theory is unscientific if it makes a prediction that can't
be
falsified
regardless of how good experimenters become,
but what
if
a theory that makes lots of predictions that could have been proven false
but
weren't and
instead were
confirmed
,
but
the same theory
also makes some predictions that can't be falsified?
Should we just pretend those predictions don't exist?
The Big Bang Theory makes a lot of predictions that have been confirmed and
one of them is that the universe is 13.8 billion years old
,
and so regardless of where we point out telescopes
it predicts
we
can
never see anything more distant than 13.8 billion years. And
indeed
our telescopes
have never
see
n anything more distant than 13.8 billion years. T
here are only 2 conclusion
s
that can be
draw
n
from
that
observation:
1) There
are
lots of stars more distant than 13.8 billion
light
years but we'll never be able to see
them
because light hasn't had enough time to reach us and due to the
accelerating universe there will never be enough time to reach us.
2)
Nothing exists that is more distant than 13.8 billion light years and t
he Earth is at the center of the Universe.
Despite what Popper might say I think #1 is the more scientific conclusion.
In a similar way Everett's Many Worlds Theory does such a good job
explaining how the 2 slit experiment
works
I don't think it's unscientific to conclude other worlds might exist.
John K Clark
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