Does Science Depend on Experimentation?

[Hawkins]

Science is the discovery of existing physcis laws and natural rules. They are laws and rules because we speculate that "something" repeats in a pattern. As things repeat we speculate and predict while they repeat, and thus form theories quantatively.

Experimentation is just to set up a repeatable model for things to be speculated predictably.

 

[ManTimeForgot]

I haven't read any Popper or much philosophy of science, but I get the feeling that falsifiability is not a better approach than positivism. No matter how many times you get a negative result ad-hoc assumptions can preserve your hypothesis.

How do you get around that?

Parsimony. The explanation with the least extravagance is used as the default position. SO if your pet theory requires 39 additional assumptions outside our current body of knowledge, and some other theory only requires 3, then science defaults to the theory with the least assumptions until there comes a time where additional evidence sheds light on the probabilities of the competing theories.

Just because something is still in competition does not mean that it is accepted as being likely. I can't discount possibility that there are a mass (or even one) of invisible tea kettles orbiting the sun right now. And even if these kettles did not contribute beyond a negligible way towards the gravity of the solar system it would still be an extraneous assumption that was not necessary to explain the observed behavior of our solar system, so without evidence which tended to suggest the existence of the tea kettles we default to assuming they are not there.

MTF