January 17, 2018 Thursday
Bedtime Story
The Sagan Standard
When Karl Popper saw so many physical
theories in the new field and their interpretations abounding at the same time
he naturally came to the conclusion that scientific theories in general are
abstract and can only be verified indirectly by testing their implications or
predictions.
It also became evident to him that
logically no matter how many experiments positively supported a scientific
theory none can confirm its absolute validity and truthfulness.
But a single experiment that refutes it
would be decisive.
It is for this reason that the general relativity
till today continues to be the subject of rigorous experimental testing.
The experiments that are till this very day
continued to be performed to verify the theory are so many and so varied that
they have to be classified into four sections that I shall list below.
You may question the need to carry out such
expensive experiments which are often performed at the cost of largely
tax-payer’s money often of different countries put together in exotic places.
Well, all I can say as a reply to your
query is that you need to listen to Carl Sagan.
In his 1980 TV show ‘Cosmos’ the astronomer
asserted an aphorism that goes like this:
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence.”
This aphorism today goes by the name of
‘Sagan Standard’ even though Sagan was not the original pioneer of this idea.
Something to the same nature had been put
forth long before him by men such as Pierre-Simon Laplace and Thomas Jefferson.
It is something akin to the concept of
burden of proof in criminal legal jurisprudence where it is entirely upon the
prosecution to prove the criminality against a person; the accused does not
even have to open his mouth.
Christopher Hitchens, one of the “Four
Horsemen” of New Atheism, went one step further and came up with a more truculent
version of the Sagan aphorism in the classical Hitchens fashion:
“What can be asserted without evidence can
be dismissed without evidence”.
This one goes by the name of Hitchens’s
razor that is an epistemological razor which emphasizes that just like in a
criminal court the burden of proof on the truthfulness of a statement rests on
the person making the claim.
The opponents do not even have to make a
verbal statement (in putting forth an argument to contradict it) in order to
dismiss such claims.
General relativity is something like
religion in the sense that the claims that it makes are extraordinarily
outlandish and tall such as gravitational time dilation, frequency shift, light
deflection, gravitation waves and a whole new way of looking at space that
surrounds us.
Such claims need to be tested repeatedly
and extraordinary experimental set ups are needed to back the theory’s claim.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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