Scientific Method Debate

You are imagining this situation from the perspective of already having a more powerful / general model and looking backwards, so it seems obvious. But that is not how things work. Without data to support it, you can imagine all kinds of possible theories - that is not science, and it certainly gets you no closer to understanding.

That is how it's supposed to work. You build a theory based on known phenomena, then you look for any new phenoma it predicts and test them in experiments. Without the new phenomena, your theory is more likely to be just "overfitting" the data. A famous example of overfitting the data - adding more cruft to account for unexplained aspects - is this: https://en.wikipedia.org&#

It's not a theory until it can make testable predictions.

So if you can't rule them out, your theory shouldn't postulate that they don't exist. It's one thing to do 100,000 experiments and have the results COMPLETELY predicted by Einstein's equations beforehand. It's quite another to invent just-so stories in terms of the theory itself after each observation!

Today's theories are constrained by so much observational data that an idea sounding "solid" or plausible at first glance just isn't enough. There are many plausible ideas that have been and are being tried all the time. The proof is in the pudding, however, which is the math. You have to show that the physical model actually predicts what we observe in quantitative terms, and is in better accordance with the observational data than the existing established theories. If you c

Not all scientific theories are equal. Some just manage to scrape by an explanation for the known facts without providing further testable predictions - while this isn't inherently bad, I place a lot more confidence in theories that explain facts that they weren't specifically invented to explain.

"Proves a theory"? Karl Popper would like to have a word with them :)

Scientists do not hope to prove theories (except mathematics, where they have axioms, so they can prove things - sometimes).Scientists may propose a novel model. Then they check whether the model predicts reality better than the old model within some boundaries. Rinse and repeat.Although a model will probably seem to be "explaining" reality, this is mostly misleading and by all means unnecessary. Pop-sci will explain anything to anyone anyway, they can even explain Hawking radiat

Nope. It's saying that the theory didn't agree with the observation, so we came up with a hypothesis, and – guess what – we haven't found any evidence against that hypothesis, and a lot of evidence for that hypothesis even in places we didn't think we'd find some! That's 100% proper scientific method. Please don't argue against stuff you only have a strawman understanding of. Even if you're on HN and think you're smart and

Hypothesis: the charge on an electron is X, as predicted by Y. Experiment: observe the charge on an electron. The experiment could have shown the charge to be other than X: in which case (assuming repeated experiments confirmed it) the hypothesis was wrong and a new one would have been needed. "Y" wasn't invented out of nothing: it was built on other observations, hypotheses, and theories. Seems pretty scientific to me, but I'm biased (since I'm a physicist