Can a false physicomathematical theory explain as well as à true one?

Answer 1

that sounds like a philosophical question. a lot of theories turn out to be false, even if they are believed to be true for centuries. does the theory in question work in practice? by that, i mean does the theory accurately predict results? as far as 'explaining well' goes, there are plenty of b.s. explanations out there that are believable enough and even work most of the time even though the person responsible for the theory misunderstood the phenomenon they were trying to explain. so my answer, in short, is 'yes'

Answer 2

This is an issue of logic. In hypothesis testing (where theories are tested), there are two related hypotheses: the null hypothesis (H0) and the alternative hypothsis (H1).

Using specific statistical procedures, one tests the null hypothesis to find out if it is valid. There are four possible outcomes of such a test. These can be represented as a table:

----------Actual----
Test---True---False
True---OK----Ooops
False-Ooops--OK

So you test your theory with a null hypothesis (e.g., it's raining outside). Automatically, your alternative hypothesis HAS to be "its NOT raining outside" because that's the logical opposite (alternative) of the null hypothesis.

OK, you test your theory by sticking your hand outside through a window and bring your hand back. Your Test claims your null hypothesis is True (your hand is wet). Had your hand come back dry, your Test result would be False (your false PM theory).

But Ooops, what if you stuck your hand out the window right under a leaking gutter, not likely, but possible. In the Actual case, it was not raining, your test should have come up with False, but in fact you get True (because of that leaky gutter). We see this result as the Ooops under the Actual True column in the table.

Now let's turn off the rain. So you test "it's raining outside" again and come back with a dry hand. Your test result is False; we can write H0: False. This means the alternative must be H1: True. Why?

Because NOT H0: NOT False = H1: True, using something called Boolean logic. NOT H0 = H1 because we wrote "it's NOT raining out" as the alternative and a bassackwards way of writing this is "NOT it's raining out" or in shorthand NOT H0.

But once again there is an Ooops. If the test result were valid, with no rain, we'd get False. But what if there were an awning over the window and we got that dry hand, while it was really raining cats and dogs outside? That would be the Ooops under the Actual False column.

Bottom line, a False PM theory, if valid (no Ooops), can tell us a lot. It can tell us the alternative is valid or, at least, NOT False (there is a distinction, but I'm not going into that). With that news, we can redesign the test to test the alternative hypothesis (which is NOT False) as a new null (with a new alternative).

In that way, we can redesign our experiments (tests) and systematically converge on a null hypothesis (theory) that will eventually test True. So, in a very true sense, all those False theories can be used to systematically find the True one.

Excellent question.

Answer 3

Sure. Ptolemy's geocentric system was so complicated and so good that it actually predicted the future positions of the planets better than Copernicus' heliocentric system did. It took Kepler, some years later, to improve on Copernicus' system enough to make it competitive with Ptolemy's.

With enough convolutions, Ptolemy's system could be made to predict the positions of the planets to any desired degree of accuracy, even though it would have no physical reality. In my opinion, this is where string theory is going. The Nova program about it is called "The Elegant Universe", but to me the whole theory is so contrived that I cannot believe it is physical reality. We are missing some underlying reality and we need another person like Copernicus or Kepler to Keep It Simple!

Answer 4

It depends on what is meant by "as well". A false theory can explain anything, but most people would not find such an explanation very useful.