Beware of Procrustes: Second Metaphor of the Scientific Method

The Procrustes in Us According to Greek mythology, Procrustes offered hospitality to passers-by with the intent to kill them. He had only one bed for all comers. To make them fit the bed, he hammered the short men and stretched them across the length of the bed, but sawed off the portions of the long men that projected beyond it. The hero Theseus eventually subdued Procrustes by forcing him to […]

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Incarnation: The Evidence of Truth

Truth is Its Own Evidence The word evidence comes from the Latin root meaning “to see”. When we demand evidence of something, we want to “see” it  in some sense, although the thing itself may be absent by circumstance, or invisible by nature. The scientific method is evidence-based. It presupposes a correspondence between true abstract theories and natural phenomena. This is why theories in physics must be corroborated by experiments […]

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Finding Cinderella: A Metaphor Of the Scientific Method

Philosophical Foundation of Science When quantum theory and the theory of general relativity shook the foundation of physics at the dawn of the 20th century, many physicists, such as Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, explored and revisited ancient Greek philosophy. For they suspected there might be something wrong with the philosophical foundation of classical physics. They attempted to retrace the steps in the labyrinth and find out where the wrong […]

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