James Burke

[den]

For lonita, a James Burke article I've never read.

How Columbus caused science, the nature of truth, and a Universe made of omlettes.

Comments

[wyrm.livejournal.com]

This i how I passed my Physics degree. There wasn't any point slaving over a hot spectroscope (it was cloudy anyway) to duplicate the results of previous experiments. If it worked out, great, but generally it didn't - and so it was just easier to take the expected results and work back. But of course it wasn't that simple (it would have been obvious), first one worked forward to determine the error figures, then one came up with a random result which was less than the error away from the expected result and simply worked back to get the observed values that gave the result. I half believe that this may be what a lot of theories are based on - but that may be me being too cynical.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]