Friday, April 27, 2012

Sane facts and plausible results

In the previous post I mentioned "sane facts" and "plausible results"; let me discuss that for a moment. Sane facts means actual facts, nothing special, just actual facts, not made up ones. Jus to give you an example: "when I drop a rock from my hand it will fall towards the ground" see, not too hard is it. "when I drop a rock from my hand it will fall towards the ground with a constant velocity" - False, look carefully and you'll notice it picks up speed; at some point it will hit terminal velocity, but i am nowhere near as tall as I'd have to be for that to have an effect. This you can actually test yourself, drop a rock from a height, and take the time, drop it from twice the height and take the time. If you get twice the time, the rock falls with a constant velocity, but if you get anything lower than twice the time, the rock accelerates. I have now provided you with facts, and I sowed you how you can test it.

Plausible results are a bit trickier to explain but bear with me on this. If you do an experiment, the conclusion you get from the experiment needs to be related to the actual experiment. Let's take a simple experiment, banging two rocks together. Now just to add some scienceyness to it, we are going to measure the temperature increase the banging had on the rocks. This experiment would not reveal the curvature of the earth, so if you conclude that the earth is round(ish) and has a radius of 6367.5 kilometers, I am not going to tell you your conclusion is wrong. I am however going to tell you that the experiment you did never, ever could tell you that. Your result is therefore not a plausible result for the experiment, it doesn't make "that exact result, forever invalid" it just means that that experiment would never reveal that conclusion.

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