{"id":194,"date":"2010-01-12T17:17:31","date_gmt":"2010-01-12T22:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2010\/01\/12\/never-believe-an-experiment-until-it-has-been-confirmed-by-a-theory\/"},"modified":"2010-01-12T17:17:31","modified_gmt":"2010-01-12T22:17:31","slug":"never-believe-an-experiment-until-it-has-been-confirmed-by-a-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2010\/01\/12\/never-believe-an-experiment-until-it-has-been-confirmed-by-a-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Never believe an experiment until it has been confirmed by a theory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Supposedly Sir Arthur Eddington said this, and supposedly he was at least partially joking.\u00a0 I like to think he was only half joking, though, because there’s a pretty big nugget of truth in this supposedly backwards statement.\u00a0 It’s really just an obnoxious way of stating another favorite adage of scientists: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.<\/em><\/p>\n

If someone tells you the result of an experiment, and that result fits nicely in with a previously-established theoretical framework, you should be more inclined to believe it than you would be for a claim that does not fit into such a framework.\u00a0 In so doing, you’re just being a good Bayesian reasoner<\/a>, taking into account both your prior knowledge and the information contained in the new experiment.<\/p>\n

Take, for instance, the idea that cell phones cause cancer.\u00a0 Maine is considering a law<\/a> requiring warning labels to this effect.\u00a0 The epidemiological evidence is, to say the least, mixed<\/a>.\u00a0 I find the “don’t believe an experiment until it’s confirmed by a theory” maxim to be a pretty convincing argument against the idea tha there’s any risk: as far as I know, no one has proposed a plausible mechanism by which the microwave radiation emitted by cell phones could cause cancer.\u00a0 As Bob Park has been pointing out in his What’s New <\/a>column for quite a while now,<\/p>\n

Cancer agents break chemical bonds, creating mutant strands of DNA. Microwave photons cannot break chemical bonds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m terribly ignorant about biology, so maybe this argument is all wrong, but it sounds convincing to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Supposedly Sir Arthur Eddington said this, and supposedly he was at least partially joking.\u00a0 I like to think he was only half joking, though, because there’s a pretty big nugget of truth in this supposedly backwards statement.\u00a0 It’s really just an obnoxious way of stating another favorite adage of scientists: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. … Continue reading Never believe an experiment until it has been confirmed by a theory<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}