“The landscape problem represents a serious problem in the development of science. Its solution requires… the construction of speculative cosmological scenarios, which posit regions or epochs of our universe for which we presently have no observable evidence. Nonetheless we must insist on taking seriously only scenarios and hypotheses that make falsifiable or strongly verifiable predictions, otherwise people can just make stuff up and the distinction between science and mythology becomes porous. …there are already candidate solutions that make real, falsifiable predictions.”
"A perspective on the landscape problem" arXiv (Feb 15, 2012)
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Lee Smolin52
American cosmologist 1955Related quotes
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Context: P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What’s more, they’ve done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever.
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The Law of Mind (1892)
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Robert Woodrow Wilson (1936) American astronomer
Conclusion of his Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1978/wilson-lecture.html (December 8, 1978) emphasizing that every new experimental discovery increases significantly our knowledge.
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Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible
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Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. I, Part 1, [The Materialist Conception of History].