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Originally Posted by Ken G
But what part of what Mendeleev and company did benefited from not dismissing everything that isn't data, inferrable from data, or useful for organizing data and guiding new experiments?
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I said
directly inferrable from data. The periodic table is inferrable from the data, but not directly (not easily) -- or others would have made the inference long before Mendeleev. To make his discovery, Mendeleev could not rely just on data collection and number crunching. He needed an insight into a pattern that was not readily apparent, he needed to
venture a guess, to take a leap of imagination. I'm saying that
this step in his discovery was not scientific in the rigid sense you seem to wish to apply the word. It was neither data nor directly inferrable from data. But if you dismiss it you'll be throwing away the creative, speculative part of science, which a crucial one.
What if Lemaître's Big Bang theory was suggested to him by his faith in the Genesis narrative? Should we therefore prohibit future scientists from using religion as an inspiration for their theories? This is all that I'm questioning. I am all for making a careful distinction between proven science and unproven inferences or extrapolations. But I also believe that
unscientific tools and paths (like faith or, say, adopting -- or even believing in -- a particular interpretation of QM) can sometimes help a particular scientist to advance science.
The lines of reasoning used by scientists, their creative inspirations if you will, do not need to be all strictly scientific, as long as the end result can be scientifically established. It seems a bad mistake to attempt to "purify" the paths that thinking people take to go from idea A to idea B. So long as in the end we manage to agree that B is the right destination, it should not matter which route each individual takes to get there. By all means, let's
allow scientists to stray from the righteous path of science -- so long as they still find their way back in the end.
Can you see my point at all? I've been getting an uneasy feeling that we're talking very much past each other, lately...