Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…For longer than that. He conducted the first one in 1881, I think, but he continued to believe until he died. He died, I think it was 1929 or so. It was the late twenties. He was still doing experiments in the 1920s about whether or not the ether existed. So he continued to believe in the ether to the end of his life. I think the last public statement he made was a year or two before he died, and he basically still believed it at that point. In fact, there was another physicist, Miller, who kept doing these experiments in the 1920s. He thought that if he went to a high enough altitude, Mount Wilson in California… “Oh, I’m high enough that the ether winds are not being dragged by the Earth. And I’ve measured the effect of the ether.” Einstein hears about this and he says, and this is where you get the famous quote, “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not. ” Anyways, I think the reason the story is interesting is for many different reasons. One of the ways in which the real history of science is different from this idea you get of the scientific method is that you really can’t apply falsification as easily as you might think. It’s not clear what is being falsified. Is it just another version of the theory of the ether that’s being falsified? Certainly you can’t induce the theory of special relativity from the fact that one version of the ether seems to be disconfirmed by these experiments. It certainly doesn’t show that ideas about falsification are wrong or falsified, but it does show that the most naive ideas… Things are often much more complicated than you think. Michelson did this experiment in 1881. He was a very young man, and then other people, I think Rayleigh was one of them, pointed out that there were some problems with the way he did it, so they had to redo it in 1887. At that point, a lot of the leading physicists of the day basically accepted this result, that there was no ether wind. But what to do about this? Sure, maybe you falsified some theories of the ether. There are others that you haven’t falsified at all at this point, and people set to work on developing those. It is funny, people will phrase it as showing that the ether didn’t exist. Even just the word “the” there is a misnomer. You actually had a ton of different theories and a couple of leading contenders. So yes, there’s some version of falsification going on, but how you respond to this new experiment is very complicated. Certainly the leading physicists of the day responded by saying, “Okay, this gives us a lot of information about what the ether must be, but it doesn’t tell us that there is no ether.”…

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