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JGWeissman comments on The Graviton as Aether - Less Wrong
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Comments (134)
"Wait, a theory was falsified by the invention of another theory?"
One that's been confirmed against hundreds of predictions to over a dozen decimal places? Yes.
"Why put false in quotes?"
Because there's a HUGE distinction between a theory like Newtonian gravitation and a "theory" like phlogiston, even if they're both "false".
"So you had a simple theory that explained some class of phenomena. Now there is some other phenomena that your theory fails to explain, why should simplicity be conserved here?"
I'm saying, "Successful theory of physics A was simple, and theory B was simple, and C was simple, and D, and E, and .... , but there's a new class of phenomena which needs a new theory, so this theory will probably also be simple."
"But the existence of competing approaches with varying degrees of popularity does not entail that."
"Approach" here is a HUGE misnomer. "Approach" is a term commonly used in engineering to mean "different ways of accomplishing goal X". You can build a machine in manner A to do X, or manner B. This ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT generalize to science, because there's only ever one reality. If you have theory A and theory B both purporting to explain some phenomenon X, either A or B must be wrong, while in engineering sometimes there are ten different ways of attacking a problem, depending on what your goals are.
(Or equivalent in a way you haven't understood yet.)
Is there a single example of this that you can think of? There are the different ways of computing classical mechanics (Newtonian, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian), but these were known to be just different ways of doing the same math at the time of discovery.
The original formulations of QM were famously shown to be equivalent, though I'm not sure they were ever expected to be incompatible. QFT and S-matrix theory were originally politically opposed (though QFT produces an S-matrix), but I have heard that recently people advocate widening QFT to the point that it appears to cover all of S-matrix theory.
No, it's just a theoretical property of the 'A, B, X' abstraction that you mention. In fact, it would not surprise me if the general problem of proving whether or not two theories are exactly equivalent is intractable in a similar way to the halting problem.