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Originally Posted by Nereid
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After all (for example), the anomalous advance of the perihelion of Mercury very clearly 'falsified' Newtonian gravity for what, many decades? Yet it was not until Einstein and GR that that theory was 'retired' as being merely a good, limited-domain explanation.
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In addition to Mercury's anomalous perihelion*, let's consider the neutrino: the initial (beta decay?) observations could have been said to 'falsify energy conservation' (and, AFAIK, some folk said exactly that, despite being quite familiar with Noether's theorem). Several decades later a testable hypothesis ('neutrino') that was built on energy conservation was confirmed, by Reines and Cowan. For those involved in researching Mercury's orbit, or beta decay (and other neutrino-related stuff), prior to GR/{Reines and Cowan}, how helpful would statements such as "Newton's universal law of gravitation has been falsified" and "the law of conservation of energy has been falsified" have been? |
Ken G differentiates between dead weight and falsified but still useful theories, and I think that points to an oversimplification of the description of the process.
For instance, in the example of Mercury, the anomaly was around for a long time before Einstein attacked it with general relativity, true, but even after he did (and he used it as a touchstone many times in his development of general relativity to judge his progress), researchers were still pursuing more classical explanations of it well into the sixties and beyond. The oblateness of the sun just wasn't that well-known at the time--and certainly not before the turn of the (19/20) century.
Anyway, does it falsify all of Newtonian mechanics, or just that particular aspect? Even after Einstein published it, there were doubts. Testing of general relativity vice Newton didn't really get going until the sixties. I think, saying the precession falsifies newtonian mechanics is an overly broad interpretation.
PS: Smiley-free posting for the last **006** posts