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Old 13-April-2008, 08:54 AM
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Robert Tulip Robert Tulip is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fortis View Post
Robert, can you tell us how you could falsify your theory. What piece of observational evidence, if it was found, would mean that you would accept that you were wrong?
There are deductive and inductive tests.

Deductively, if the mathematics of the Great Year, including my claim that the Age is a harmonic twelve part division of it, were shown to be false, this would undermine my theory. If the link between precession and the barycenter cycle was proved to be invalid this would weaken my theory but would not falsify it.

Inductively, there is potential for large scale data mining and statistical analysis, including Fourier analysis, to test for the existence of cosmic cycles in history. For the historical age claim in this thread, this inductive testing faces the complex problem of how to describe data points that are separated by long time periods. I hope this problem will eventually be surmountable, in which case it might reveal cycles of differing periods or none at all which would falsify the claim. An intermediate step could be, as I have suggested before, to conduct large scale epidemiological study of planetary effects, for example by putting birth and death dates of millions of people into a database and looking to see if any variance in lifespan correlates to planetary alignments. The SSB is an integrated combination of all planetary alignments, so a demonstration that no planetary alignments had statistical effect on life expectancy would be a test that would undermine the whole project of finding correlations between human culture and cosmic cycles. I believe these effects are at the liminal boundary of measurability so large datasets and good protocols are needed for testing. If large scale statistical tests found nothing, that would not necessarily prove planetary effects do not exist, just that they are so small as not to be worth worrying about. If the China data had not enabled me to spin a plausible story it would have been a setback.

On a side point, Karl Popper's theory of falsifiability strikes me as inadequate as a theory of knowledge. He sets out some implications in his book The Poverty of Historicism, where he lays into Plato, unfairly in my view, as the root of totalitarianism. I am presenting a rather extreme historicist argument here, and I would reject the claim that this is intrinsically, or at all, totalitarian. A problem with Popper's critique is that scientific knowledge is only a part of the encompassing narrative explaining human life. Plato suggests that society benefits from forming consensus around ideas such as goodness, love, beauty and justice, but these are quite untestable in Popper's sense. Popper seems to call for a skeptical relativism in which all untestable ideas are dismissed as equally subjective. In my case, I am arguing that terrestrial nature must be integrated into a cosmic framework, and that this can produce an objective narrative of history. To some extent this is based on values rather than facts, ie on a Gaian narrative about the nature of the planet as an organism, and the need for large scale immediate reform to address climate problems. Is calling the planet an organism a statement of fact or of value? I believe this narrative will in time be recognised as objective, evidence-based and testable.