08 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
What are Observations?
What are observations? Some philosophers have taken them to be sensory events: the occurrence of smells, feels, noises, color patches. This way lies frustration. What we ordinarily notice and testify to are rather the objects and events out in the world. It is to these that our very language is geared, because language is a social institution, learned from other people who share the scene to which the words refer. Observation sentences, like theoretical sentences, are for the most part senten...Folksonomies: belief
Folksonomies: belief
24 DEC 2016 by ideonexus
Natural Selection Resembles Bayesian Inference
The analogy is mathematically precise, and fascinating. In rough terms, it says that the process of natural selection resembles the process of Bayesian inference. A population of organisms can be thought of as having various 'hypotheses' about how to survive—each hypothesis corresponding to a different allele. (Roughly, an allele is one of several alternative versions of a gene.) In each successive generation, the process of natural selection modifies the proportion of organisms having each...25 FEB 2016 by ideonexus
227 cognitive verbs organized into 24 categories of seman...
Add to: combine, deepen, improve, incorporate, integrate, introduceArrange: arrange, list, organize, sortBig picture: comprehend, contextualize, orient, understandCollaborate: collaborate, contribute, engage, interact, participate, shareCompare: associate, categorize, classify, compare, connect, contrast, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, link, match, relateCreate: accomplish, achieve, build, compose, construct, create, develop, draft, form, generate, initiate, produce, publish, recor...17 NOV 2014 by ideonexus
An Eloquent Description of Science and Wonder
As I gathered information for this book, I was continually reminded of the reality that science, rooted as it is in the certainties of the physical world, is a process that necessarily unfolds over time. In school, science classes tend to work according to this linear model; there's a “beginning, middle, and end” to science investigations, no matter how hard teachers may fight the “cookbook” reductionism that threatens true scientific inquiry. Yet, in probing further, I came to unders...21 JUN 2014 by ideonexus
The Rate of Change of a Rate of Change
In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word 'simplest'. It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as dx/dt = K(d^2x/dy^2) much less simple than 'it oozes', of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement ...30 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Bottom-Up VS Top-Down Method for Finding Laws
Broadly speaking, to discover new regularities and laws we either follow top–down or the bottom–up approach (Fig. 1). In the top–down approach, the search begins with an external observation e.g., Newton’s laws of motion. The observer intuitively imagines a set of elements, a set of interactions and a mathematically expressible form to connect the two. Components are weaved into a mental map and experiments are planned to verify or nullify the model. If the experimental observations r...Fascinating explanation for why laws are harder and harder to find as we move into macroscopic sciences.