On Sat, 4 Oct 2014 15:03:44 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
.. .
On Fri, 3 Oct 2014 10:38:52 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:


You're talking about engineering more than science. No amount of
deductive theorizing or undirected observation would produce Special
Relativity. It depended, first, on a great insight; and then was
proven by highly-directed observation based on that insight.


You have it backwards.
This is the sequence that produced Special Relativity:
http://www.everythingimportant.org/r...1964_scrib.pdf
"The first stage in the evolution of the Special Theory of Relativity
is generally recognized as beginning with the failure to detect
experimentally the motion of the earth through the ether."

This is an old controversy which I will not get into. But one could
make the point that the failure of theories about the "ether," and the
failure to experimentally detect the motion of the earth through the
"ether,." required a new insight and a new formulation. That's what
Einstein did.

As that paper you linked to says, "For to appreciate the significance
of Einstein's 1905 paper it it important to see how he was able to
find a new point of view..."

Regardless, the point is that many of the great discoveries in science
were the result of great insights. In this case, the proof came after
the insight. Previous experiments produced questions, not directions.


Michelson - Poincare' / Fitzgerald / Lorentz - Einstein

Theory is "correct" only when it can explain all observations.

Unless the theory is that you can explain a statistical probability of
observations. Theories do not always depend upon strict reduction to
causation.

For example the theory about T-cells and the mechanism by which they
go awry, leading to juvenile diabetes. The theory is that the T-cells
in some small portion of the population have a genetic disposition to
misread the chemical signals of certain traumas as being the chemical
signals of the beta cells in one's pancreas. But it is not known why
or how that happens. There is no more than hypotheses about the path
of causation.

So an observation that one individual becomes diabetic, while his
identical twin does not, is not explained by the theory. Yet,
statistically, the theory that there is a genetic dispostion holds up
to a known degree of probability.

--
Ed Huntress

-jsw