Falsifiability

[Sir Doom]

Here is a nice biography of Karl Popper who originally championed the idea.

Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

This is really detailed and includes a wealth of other ideas this guy had. Brilliant, really.

[Revoltingest]

He's the guy with the penguins, right?

[Sir Doom]

Originally Posted by Revoltingest

He's the guy with the penguins, right?

No, he's the guy with the penguins, left. Sorry to disappoint.

[painted wolf]

Originally Posted by Revoltingest

He's the guy with the penguins, right?

Actually it was black swans...


But I suppose white penguins would have worked just as well.



wa:do

[Sir Doom]

lol, awesome.

[Penumbra]

Originally Posted by painted wolf

But I suppose white penguins would have worked just as well.



wa:do

omygosh I want to pet them.

Way too cute.

Originally Posted by Me Myself

Talk me about falsifiability

I´ve seen it in wiki, but I would like to know how deep inrooted is it in scientific method and how unanimous or not is it in science that falsifiability is a need for something to be science.

I think that´s all

I think others provided good resources.

Without falsifiability, anything can be proposed. Now, more rigorous proposals may be taken a bit more seriously, but if there's no way to test a proposal at all, then it's only speculation. Sometimes with things like string theory, proposals that are not particularly falsifiable get misunderstood by the public as though they were fact. One can use math to provide some pretty interesting ideas but in order to really know something, theories must be put to the test.

Einstein's Special or General Relativity, for example, was not what won him the Nobel prize. His work on the Photoelectric Effect is what won him the Nobel Prize, because Relativity was less intuitive, and harder to try to falsify and convince the whole scientific community.