Ellie gets stumped!
Channel: rozeboosje
Date: 2008-06-15

Seriously. It's a pity that that cell phone rang when it did ;-)

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I edited out a bit where I criticised her misinterpretation of Ockham's Razor. Just for completeness' sake, here it is:

Ockham's Razor is not a mechanism for finding truth. It is a mechanism for deciding, when presented with competing theories, which one is the most promising, and therefore the one should proceed with. The purpose, of course, remains to attempt to FALSIFY that theory, and this is where Ockham's Razor proves so useful. Firstly, the chosen theory tends to be the one one can take furthest (each unnecessary assumption being a potential pitfall for any theory), and secondly, the more concise and clear a theory is, the easier it is to devise experiments that will either hold up or falsify such a theory, so the theory chosen by Ockham's Razor will tend to be the one that scientists can make the most of.