Ok, so it’s important that we understand that there is a distinction between the models, or paradigms that scientists use and the real world. But when I first started to think about these things I got a bit confused. What about computers? Computer people always say “that’s not possible†without any hint that there is [...]
Date archive for January, 2007
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Sometimes Models Make Reality
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Believe Data, not Models.
I recently wrote about what a scientific model is, and what are the limits of using models. Briefly, you can’t prove that the language used (logic) is consistent, and you can’t prove that the model really maps onto the world. Now I want to talk about why it is important for scientists to understand this, [...]
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Saturday night hospital incident
On Saturday night my grandfather suffered a transient ischaemic attack. I got out of the tube, on my way to meet friends to discover a voicemail from my mother. She was in the emergency resuscitation ward of the Homerton Hospital with my grandfather, who had suffered an incident of some form. Since then he has [...]
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Checking that it is true that true is true should not be hard!
I spent most of the last day or so playing with testing in ruby on rails. It should be pretty easy, after all rails has testing built in, right? Well that’s what I thought, and I was right, but only to a point. Starting off with a simple example class ItemTest < Test::Unit::TestCase def test_truth [...]
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When Scientific Models End
Finally I have managed to describe what I want to say about how science works. The concept of a model, that can be manipulated by some tools, and that there are similarities (isomorphism if you want to be pompous) between the model and the way the real world works. I have also explained, though probably [...]
