On a tangent, I appreciate this bit in Daniel Whiteson’s answer:
“I’m not a fan of categorizing things as ‘science’ or ‘not science,’ because who knows what nerdy curiosity will lead to a discovery?”
And also in Thomas Van Riet’s answer:
“People say that without experiment we cannot call one theory better than another. That is plain wrong. There are many consistency checks, which are ridiculously hard to pass. Can you compute black hole entropy? String theorists were able to compute it in very idealized circumstances and reproduced Hawking’s famous formula for black hole entropy!”
You’ll sometimes see flat earthers, creationists, etc. taking a textbook definition of the Scientific Method, claim that anything that doesn’t do that is “not science”, and therefore wrong. Except that’s not at all how it works. The important part is gathering data to support your claims. That data could be experimental, but it could also be observational.
On a tangent, I appreciate this bit in Daniel Whiteson’s answer:
“I’m not a fan of categorizing things as ‘science’ or ‘not science,’ because who knows what nerdy curiosity will lead to a discovery?”
And also in Thomas Van Riet’s answer:
“People say that without experiment we cannot call one theory better than another. That is plain wrong. There are many consistency checks, which are ridiculously hard to pass. Can you compute black hole entropy? String theorists were able to compute it in very idealized circumstances and reproduced Hawking’s famous formula for black hole entropy!”
You’ll sometimes see flat earthers, creationists, etc. taking a textbook definition of the Scientific Method, claim that anything that doesn’t do that is “not science”, and therefore wrong. Except that’s not at all how it works. The important part is gathering data to support your claims. That data could be experimental, but it could also be observational.