> I just linked to the first article I found that talked about the subject. And it's interesting that you look for something lazy instead of addressing more serious issues like Newton's model vs Einstien's.
You should give links you're willing to stand by. I didn't go looking for something lazy, I went looking for talk about fundamental physics (where Occam's Razor is appropriate, and what we're talking about) and found only the barely even wrong throwaway line about M-theory.
> Very clearly the (much!) more complex answer is more correct than the simple one.
Newton and Einstein don't make the same predictions. When you include the amount that you'd have to add on to Newton's theory to generate the predictions Einstein gives you about the behaviour of light, Einstein ends up simpler.
> Here's [1] another link discussing the issue and gives 2 examples.
The "new particle" example shows the opposite of what's claimed. Bethe's only reason to dismiss a new particle as an explanation was Occam's razor. The part about Newton/Einstein is just wrong about the history; relativity wasn't developed as an effort to explain the orbit of Mercury, it was developed out of Maxwell and Lorentz's work on electromagnetism. A universe in which the only reason to believe relativity was those deviations in the orbit of Mercury probably would be a universe in which the true theory was Newtonian gravity with small correction terms, not a universe in which relativity was true.
>Bethe's only reason to dismiss a new particle as an explanation was Occam's razor.
Thank you for pointing out the other fault of Occam's razor: both sides of most arguments tend to assume the razor is on their side. This aspect was addressed in the second article I linked.
It's possible to make a mistake in the application of any principle, particularly when the mistake suggests you've made an important discovery. I think there would have been a clear consensus among third-party physicists that the razor favoured Bethe in that case.
You should give links you're willing to stand by. I didn't go looking for something lazy, I went looking for talk about fundamental physics (where Occam's Razor is appropriate, and what we're talking about) and found only the barely even wrong throwaway line about M-theory.
> Very clearly the (much!) more complex answer is more correct than the simple one.
Newton and Einstein don't make the same predictions. When you include the amount that you'd have to add on to Newton's theory to generate the predictions Einstein gives you about the behaviour of light, Einstein ends up simpler.
> Here's [1] another link discussing the issue and gives 2 examples.
The "new particle" example shows the opposite of what's claimed. Bethe's only reason to dismiss a new particle as an explanation was Occam's razor. The part about Newton/Einstein is just wrong about the history; relativity wasn't developed as an effort to explain the orbit of Mercury, it was developed out of Maxwell and Lorentz's work on electromagnetism. A universe in which the only reason to believe relativity was those deviations in the orbit of Mercury probably would be a universe in which the true theory was Newtonian gravity with small correction terms, not a universe in which relativity was true.