>In the late 19th century, Newtonian physics was the model that most scientists subscribed to as it seem to explain a great deal about how the universe worked.
This is a mythological view of the history of science. Newton published the Principia in 1687. A great deal of work was done on physics after that. For example, Lagrange introduced his extremely important alternative to Newtonian mechanics already in 1760. Pierre Simon Laplace had introduced the idea of the field to explain what otherwise looked like action at a distance in the late 18th century. Moreover, by the 1830s we also had Hamiltonian Mechanics (which also form the basis of quantum mechanics).
By the late 19th century, real physics (as opposed to the physics we learn in highschool or popular science books) was as much Lagrangean, Laplacian, and Hamiltonian as it was Newtonian. Indeed, we might also add that it was Maxwellian, Planckian, etc.
>However, there was a problem, Newtonian physics couldn’t account for certain aspects of mercurys orbit so scientist theorised an additional planet somewhere between mercury and the sun which they named Vulcan and they conducted searches to try and locate it, many respectable scientist claimed that they had seen it.
The specific problem was that Mercury's elliptical orbit precesses. This was identified by Urbain Le Verrier, ca 1859. Some people did claim to have observed Vulcan. "Respectable scientist" are simply weasel words. Respectability has nothing to do with it. Either one's results are confirmed or they are not. Vulcan sightings relied on faulty methods and failed to replicate. This is not uncommon, then and now.
However, by 1908, somewhat before the publication of Einstein's account of gravitation was published in 1915, it was clear that Vulcan did not exist.
>Then with the introduction of Einsteinian relativity, there was no more need for Vulcon to explain Mercury’s orbit.
Einstein provided a better explanation for an effect that Vulcan had already failed to explain. However, we already know that relativity is incomplete. It does not explain the big bang.
>I find this very troubling, if Vulcan never existed what was it that all those credible scientists saw, completely shattered my high school idea of scientists as people who follow the data and rush to falsify their theories, it seems more like they have a theory which works most of the time and in the case where it doesn’t they massage it with proposed explanations which will fit the data into the theory.
You can read about the kind of data that were misinterpreted as evidence for Vulcan in many different places. Not least of which is the Wikipedia Article on Vulcan, which has a overview. There are popular histories of the search for Vulcan, but the titles are not very promising since they reference exactly the tropes that you have already noted.
The reality of science is far from the idealised, bowdlerised versions we meet in popular science books or in highschool science (or even undergrad science when I did it). Science is human, therefore science is messy.
Misinterpreting data is very common. This is why we insist on replication as a basic criteria for evaluating the value of science. Of course, in the media this criteria has long been abandoned in favour so sensationalism.
After WWII physicists began to receive large amounts of public funding in the hope that physicists would make discoveries that belligerent capitalist governments could exploit as weapons of mass destruction or as sources of profit. Scientists were incorporated into the military-industrial complex, with all the reprehensible behaviour that this entails: politics, empire building, conniving, exploitation (esp. of grad students), shilling, headline grabbing, fraud, etc.
People are just people. Science is an ideal. We aim for the ideal and we almost inevitably fail to attain it. And if, by some miracle we do attain it, we are forced to prescribe another (higher) ideal that is less attainable.
We are what we are. Science is what it is.
The discomfort you are experiencing is the naïveté leaving your body. It's a good thing. This would be a good thread for you to follow up in detail, to get a better sense of how science works in practice.
You have a nieve view of verification. When a theory gives a wrong predictions any statement of the theory or indeed any statement of your background assumptions could be the the problematic one.
Scientists need to be pragmatic, you're not going to revise the laws of thermodynamics if your thermometer shows the rooms is 100 degrees. You will rather assume the thermometer is broken. This is totally rational and it's certainly not "making the evidence fit the theory". It is only after a large amount of anomalies accumulate that the theory is rejected.
Science in the 19th century worked very differently from how it works now. The idea that you need to falsify hypotheses in order to build scientific theories only became the mainstream scientific method with the advent of critical rationalism and Karl Popper in the first half of the 20th century and was still debated even later.
Add to that the fact that just a few years before the Vulcan hypothesis, Neptune had been discovered only because there were irregularities in Uranus' orbit. It was a big deal, because it had been the first time that the existence of a celestial body had been mathematically predicted and was indeed where we expected it to be. So the hype around the method in scientist circles was huge.
Here comes the kicker. The discovery of Uranus made Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier very famous. And in fact it was Le Verrier himself who was the first to report on the anomaly in Mercury's orbit too. One of his possible explanations was another planet, though that wasn't his only proposed explanation. But because of the earlier succes with Uranus and the fame that came with that discovery other scientist were very eager to find Vulcan.
Good answer here. I would question the claim that Popper’s falsification approach is a mainstream part of how science works now. For some aspects, sure, but not nearly as mainstream as we’re taught in high school.
You are right of course. In sociology critical rationalism is challenged from many sides, rightfully so. It's just that in the common understanding of the scientific method falsifiability in the tradition of critical rationalism is seen as the standard, that's what I was referencing here.
Scientists are human, and while some of them remember their skepticism, a depressingly large number are simply trying to make a name for themselves, and tend to see whatever helps them do that.
Do you understand that "dark matter" is just a name for something that is simply lacking in our models?
This is not a case of "there is a planet here we can't see that we will call dark planet". There are different hypothesis that go from large spaces of emptiness being time dilation the answer, others saying these are microblackholes, but at the end of the day is just a term to explain that there is something we have absolutely no idea what is it that is NOT in our models.
Given the evidence you presented that normal science tries to fit anomalies into the reigning theory, consider all the gymanastics cosmology is undergoing today to preserve General Relativity against 'dark matter' and 'dark energy', placeholders meant to keep GR intact. Most scientists/ humans are not that creative, you need an original thinker to think oitside the box of this is our theory and we can't do better.
Prajnamarga | 16 hours ago
>In the late 19th century, Newtonian physics was the model that most scientists subscribed to as it seem to explain a great deal about how the universe worked.
This is a mythological view of the history of science. Newton published the Principia in 1687. A great deal of work was done on physics after that. For example, Lagrange introduced his extremely important alternative to Newtonian mechanics already in 1760. Pierre Simon Laplace had introduced the idea of the field to explain what otherwise looked like action at a distance in the late 18th century. Moreover, by the 1830s we also had Hamiltonian Mechanics (which also form the basis of quantum mechanics).
By the late 19th century, real physics (as opposed to the physics we learn in highschool or popular science books) was as much Lagrangean, Laplacian, and Hamiltonian as it was Newtonian. Indeed, we might also add that it was Maxwellian, Planckian, etc.
>However, there was a problem, Newtonian physics couldn’t account for certain aspects of mercurys orbit so scientist theorised an additional planet somewhere between mercury and the sun which they named Vulcan and they conducted searches to try and locate it, many respectable scientist claimed that they had seen it.
The specific problem was that Mercury's elliptical orbit precesses. This was identified by Urbain Le Verrier, ca 1859. Some people did claim to have observed Vulcan. "Respectable scientist" are simply weasel words. Respectability has nothing to do with it. Either one's results are confirmed or they are not. Vulcan sightings relied on faulty methods and failed to replicate. This is not uncommon, then and now.
However, by 1908, somewhat before the publication of Einstein's account of gravitation was published in 1915, it was clear that Vulcan did not exist.
>Then with the introduction of Einsteinian relativity, there was no more need for Vulcon to explain Mercury’s orbit.
Einstein provided a better explanation for an effect that Vulcan had already failed to explain. However, we already know that relativity is incomplete. It does not explain the big bang.
>I find this very troubling, if Vulcan never existed what was it that all those credible scientists saw, completely shattered my high school idea of scientists as people who follow the data and rush to falsify their theories, it seems more like they have a theory which works most of the time and in the case where it doesn’t they massage it with proposed explanations which will fit the data into the theory.
You can read about the kind of data that were misinterpreted as evidence for Vulcan in many different places. Not least of which is the Wikipedia Article on Vulcan, which has a overview. There are popular histories of the search for Vulcan, but the titles are not very promising since they reference exactly the tropes that you have already noted.
The reality of science is far from the idealised, bowdlerised versions we meet in popular science books or in highschool science (or even undergrad science when I did it). Science is human, therefore science is messy.
Misinterpreting data is very common. This is why we insist on replication as a basic criteria for evaluating the value of science. Of course, in the media this criteria has long been abandoned in favour so sensationalism.
Scientific fraud is also fairly common. See for example the Retraction Watch website.
After WWII physicists began to receive large amounts of public funding in the hope that physicists would make discoveries that belligerent capitalist governments could exploit as weapons of mass destruction or as sources of profit. Scientists were incorporated into the military-industrial complex, with all the reprehensible behaviour that this entails: politics, empire building, conniving, exploitation (esp. of grad students), shilling, headline grabbing, fraud, etc.
People are just people. Science is an ideal. We aim for the ideal and we almost inevitably fail to attain it. And if, by some miracle we do attain it, we are forced to prescribe another (higher) ideal that is less attainable.
We are what we are. Science is what it is.
The discomfort you are experiencing is the naïveté leaving your body. It's a good thing. This would be a good thread for you to follow up in detail, to get a better sense of how science works in practice.
GooseMuckle | 6 hours ago
>Lagrange introduced his extremely important alternative to Newtonian mechanics already in 1760.
Lagrangian mechanics is a formulation of, not an alternative to, Newtonian mechanics. It's entirely based on and derived from Newton's laws.
Moral_Conundrums | 17 hours ago
You have a nieve view of verification. When a theory gives a wrong predictions any statement of the theory or indeed any statement of your background assumptions could be the the problematic one.
Scientists need to be pragmatic, you're not going to revise the laws of thermodynamics if your thermometer shows the rooms is 100 degrees. You will rather assume the thermometer is broken. This is totally rational and it's certainly not "making the evidence fit the theory". It is only after a large amount of anomalies accumulate that the theory is rejected.
Prajnamarga | 17 hours ago
Naïve or naive.
Pugs-r-cool | 13 hours ago
> You have a nieve view of…
Seems to describe many posts in this subreddit.
ThemrocX | 17 hours ago
To clarify some things:
Science in the 19th century worked very differently from how it works now. The idea that you need to falsify hypotheses in order to build scientific theories only became the mainstream scientific method with the advent of critical rationalism and Karl Popper in the first half of the 20th century and was still debated even later.
Add to that the fact that just a few years before the Vulcan hypothesis, Neptune had been discovered only because there were irregularities in Uranus' orbit. It was a big deal, because it had been the first time that the existence of a celestial body had been mathematically predicted and was indeed where we expected it to be. So the hype around the method in scientist circles was huge.
Here comes the kicker. The discovery of Uranus made Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier very famous. And in fact it was Le Verrier himself who was the first to report on the anomaly in Mercury's orbit too. One of his possible explanations was another planet, though that wasn't his only proposed explanation. But because of the earlier succes with Uranus and the fame that came with that discovery other scientist were very eager to find Vulcan.
Live long and prosper!
extraneousness | 16 hours ago
Good answer here. I would question the claim that Popper’s falsification approach is a mainstream part of how science works now. For some aspects, sure, but not nearly as mainstream as we’re taught in high school.
ThemrocX | 14 hours ago
You are right of course. In sociology critical rationalism is challenged from many sides, rightfully so. It's just that in the common understanding of the scientific method falsifiability in the tradition of critical rationalism is seen as the standard, that's what I was referencing here.
Ch3cks-Out | 16 hours ago
>what was it that all those credible scientists saw
They saw a speculative theory, which collapsed under contrasting with observational evidence
No_Rec1979 | 8 hours ago
Your high school model needed to shatter.
Scientists are human, and while some of them remember their skepticism, a depressingly large number are simply trying to make a name for themselves, and tend to see whatever helps them do that.
Savings-Bee-4993 | 11 hours ago
Read Kuhn’s Structure.
no_coffee_thanks | 11 hours ago
A great book about this is Thomas Levenson's The Hunt for Vulcan. Highly recommended.
Universal_Confucius | 4 hours ago
Just like dark energy.
Mission-Landscape-17 | 13 hours ago
odds are that today's equivalent is dark matter. We need some one to come along and devedop a new theory of gravity.
Crosas-B | 7 hours ago
Do you understand that "dark matter" is just a name for something that is simply lacking in our models?
This is not a case of "there is a planet here we can't see that we will call dark planet". There are different hypothesis that go from large spaces of emptiness being time dilation the answer, others saying these are microblackholes, but at the end of the day is just a term to explain that there is something we have absolutely no idea what is it that is NOT in our models.
seldomtimely | 12 hours ago
Given the evidence you presented that normal science tries to fit anomalies into the reigning theory, consider all the gymanastics cosmology is undergoing today to preserve General Relativity against 'dark matter' and 'dark energy', placeholders meant to keep GR intact. Most scientists/ humans are not that creative, you need an original thinker to think oitside the box of this is our theory and we can't do better.
NihiloZero | 5 hours ago
There is science, and there is scientism. The latter undermines the former in a wide variety of ways.