Who Were the Sea Peoples?

This article is worthy of careful consideration. Consider these quotes: Scientists have substantial evidence that dark matter exists and is at least five times as abundant as ordinary matter. But its nature remains a mystery. “If it’s really dark matter, many other experiments should have seen it already,” says Thomas Schwetz-Mangold, a theoretical physicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany—and none has. “The modulation signal is there,” says Kaixuan Ni at the University of California, San Diego, who works on a dark-matter experiment called XENON1T. “But how to interpret that signal—whether it’s from dark matter or something else—-is not clear.” The fact that many have tried and failed to repeat DAMA’s experiment shows that it is not easy, says Elisabetta Barberio at the University of Melbourne, who leads the Australian arm of SABRE. “The more one looks into their experiment, the more one realizes that it is very well done.” So scientists have evidence...

vagueness: "Sir Karl [Popper] is not, of course, a naive falsificationist. He knows all that has just been said and has emphasized it from the beginning of his career...: 'In point of fact, no conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced; for it is always possible to say that the experimental results are not reliable or that the discrepancies which are asserted to exist between the experimental results and the theory are only apparent and they will disappear with the advance of our understanding.' [But] having barred conclusive disproof, he has provided no substitute for it, and the relation he does employ remains that of logical falsification. Though he is not a naive falsificationist, Sir Karl may, I suggest, legitimately be treated as one." -- Thomas Kuhn, "Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research" So we have two sorts of falsificationists: 1) The naive ones, who think, "Well, an experiment didn't agree with your theory, so chu...

"But there yet remains an almost ludicrous part of the story to be told. The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887... actually did not give the result required by relativity! It admittedly substantiated its authors' claim that the relative motion of the earth and the 'ether' did not exceed a quarter of the earth's orbital velocity. But the actually observed effect was not negligible; or has, at any rate, not been proved negligible up to this day... Moreover, an effect of the same magnitude was reproduced by D. C. Miller and his collaborators in a long series of experiments extending from 1902-1926, in which they repeated the Michaelson-Morley experiment with new, more accurate apparatus, many thousands of times ." -- Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge , p. 12, emphasis mine Polanyi notes that when Miller announced his results... the general community of scientists simply ignored him. They were already convinced that relativity was correct, and didn't ...

The statement in the title is true in a number of ways, but here is a very simple argument. Let us say we have decisively "falsified" a theory: rocks float on water, perhaps. So, per Popper, we now abandon that theory, and come up with a new bold conjecture. Well, this abandonment depends entirely on an inductive inference! In fact, it depends on the principle of "conservative induction" being true: more of the same . Unless that is the case, why should the theory having been falsified today having anything whatsoever to do with whether we should employ it tomorrow ? Imagine that, instead, the principle of revolutionary induction is true: time for a change . In that case, the fact that our theory was falsified today should give us great hope for the theory tomorrow. And if that principle is true, then we should abandon all of our theories that have not been falsified right away! So, falsification, far from solving the "problem" of induction by el...