Quote:
Originally Posted by Nereid
Back to beta decay: what status should we give the 'law' of conservation of energy, between the first discovery of 'missing energy' in such decays and 1957?
Or, more up to date, between Davis' first solar neutrino results and the discovery of neutrino oscillations, what (if anything) could have been said to have been falsified (by Davis' results)? solar models? the whole of the Standard Model of particle physics? And after neutrino oscillations were discovered, did one or other theory/model/etc become 'unfalsified'?
After all, 'falsification' isn't a terribly useful concept if its scope of applicability is highly ambiguous (or, worse, arbitrary or undefinable), don't you think?
* or, even better in the case of Newtonian gravity, a "law"!
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snipped by me
There was alot of waiting with baited breath between the neutrino being postulated and it being detected. That was a very clear cut situation of is conservation a law or not.
Neutrino oscillation is an even better example. The neutrino anomaly meant one of two things, either we didnt understand neutrinos, or we didnt understand fusion. If there were no neutrino oscillation, then the calculations that gave us stellar structure that matches mass to luminosity would be wrong. If you continue down the path, the calculations that give almost anything atomic would be wrong, but that wouldnt be your biggest problem. Your real problem would be that all your incorrect calculations
matched up with experiment. Now you have to explain how so many people got the right solution with an incorrect calculation.