Re: [asa] YEC--What can we offer them?

Randy wrote:

> By the way, in my talk I ended up claiming that, as far as I could tell,
> there has been no case where a scientific theory which has been validated by
>
> data from many independent sources and which is accepted as consensus by the
>
> mainstream community, has been later invalidated. I'd love to hear of any
> examples that any of you might think of.
>

I'm not sure exactly how to assess "validated by the data",
but at least if we presume, "validated at the time", I think
the geocentric vs heliocentric issue is one.

Even at the time of Copernicus, it would have been a bit mad
to believe the earth went around the sun. Very likely,
experts of the day would have pointed out what happens to
a something of the equivalent of a marble on a merry-go-round.
Their reasoning would have been sound (though ignoring their
own delimma with epicycles), but the marble would be a testable
example that could be scaled to the earth at least. No one could
know much about the heavenly bodies.

If you go to "frame of reference", I guess you can also say that
it is a refinement, but I still think it really was a radical
inversion of the way of thinking. When Newton's gravitational
theory became known, that certainly gave an enormous weight
to the heliocentric view, but without a law of gravitation,
both models were ad hoc and lacked a sound physical explanation
for the epicycles (geocentric) and orbits (heliocentric).

Nevertheless, I think these examples are rare.

More often, it is as you have said, refinements, adjustments
etc. I don't really see things like relativity theory being
as much a paradigm shift as an extension of the limiting
case of Newton's law of gravitation. What happens when the
velocities approach relativistic scales. Likewise, quantum
mechanics questions what happens when the length scales
approach atomic and smaller. At the same time, both
discoveries lead to observation of deeper and more peculiar
properties of matter.

Even when there is a radical change, there is a clear
and sensible explanation for how one we got stuck with the wrong
concept. Even in the heliocentric vs geocentric, we can work back
to the original assumptions and show that the new discovery has actually
expanded our understanding of the subject.

By Grace we proceed,
Wayne (ASA member)

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Received on Wed Jul 4 10:02:20 2007