>Obviously you need a refresher course on the basic philosophy of science. I
>don't have time to go into details now, but very briefly, theory can never
>"pretend" to be data, because theory cannot exist in the absence of data.
>If you have a theory, then you have data to support it.
Someone does...maybe it is Einstin or Crick?
Heisenberg asserted that only observable magnitudes [facts] must go into a
theory and chided Einstein that he himself had stressed this in formulating
the theory of gravity Einstein's response was classic: "Possibly I did use
this kind of reasoning but it is nonsense all the same. Perhaps I could put
it more diplomatically by saying that it may be heuristically useful to
keep in mind what
one has observed. But on principle it is quite wrong to try founding a
theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite
happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe"
Crick has also commented on the role of "facts" in science. From "The
Eighth Day of Creation" by H. F. Judson, (Simon and Schuster, NY.1979),
Quoting Crick in context:
"They [Bragg, Kendrew, Perutz] missed the alpha helix because of that
reflection! You see. And the fact that they didn't put the peptide bond in
right. The point is that evidence [facts] can be unreliable, and therefore
you should use as little of it as you can. And when we confront problems
today, we're in exactly the same situation. We have three or four bits of
data, we don't know
which one is reliable, so we say, now, if we discard that one and assume
it's wrong--even though we have no evidence that it's wrong--then we can
look at the rest of the data and see if we can make sense of that. And
that's what we do all the time. I mean people don't realize that not only
can data be wrong in science, it can be misleading. There isn't such a
thing as a hard fact when you are
trying to discover something. It's only afterward that the facts become hard."