this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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Science Memes

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[โ€“] addie@feddit.uk 27 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Scientific method and all that. Any conjecture is okay.

Now, what's the hypothesis that you can make out of it? We've plenty of observations that don't match theory, which we believe to be on account of dark matter - galaxy rotation speeds, what happens in the core of a type 2 supernova, and so on. Does this hypothesis explain those problems better than what we have?

If it does, keep it. If it doesn't, discard it. Repeat, until we've solved all the mysteries of the universe by banging our heads against them.

This strikes me as the kind of conjecture that has no predictive power, and therefore must be discarded, but I'm no PhD-level theoretical physicist.

This strikes me as the kind of conjecture that has no predictive power, and therefore must be discarded

Maybe it doesn't provide much in itself, but can help with providing an alternate framework for thinking about observational anomalies in the future.

Heliocentrism didn't actually improve the predictions of planet movement over geocentric models with epicycles, at least until Kepler swapped out circles for ellipses. So heliocentrism didn't give an immediate advantage, but laid the groundwork for later improvements that could surpass the limits of geocentrism.