One red flag that a theory might be in trouble is when one has to invoke tooth fairies to preserve it. These are what the philosophers of science more properly call auxiliary hypotheses: unexpected elements that are not part of the original theory that we have been obliged to add in order to preserve it.
- Stacy McGaugh at his Triton Station blog.
2 comments:
string theory
String theory has the opposite problem. Rather than containing too many auxiliary hypotheses, it doesn't predict a sufficiently specific and narrow set of phenomena and instead naturally and without elaboration allows for all manner of things that we don't observe.
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