Rick, (01)
I agree Anderson is wide of the mark characterizing this as an end to
scientific method. (02)
I even think he is wrong calling it an "End of Theory". (03)
If the core of scientific method is experiment, what you might say we
have in the context of the Web is just the success of the indexed
search experiment over the categorized search experiment. As I say, I
don't think this indicates an "End of Theory" so much as "the birth of
the theory that there can be lots more theories buried in a set of
data than we've ever imagined we needed to look for before." (04)
What we might have to abandon is not "theory", but the idea of a
single comprehensive "Theory of Everything" (in a narrow,
reductionist, sense.) (05)
But "scientific method" and "theory" at the end of the day are just
words again, and open to dispute. Rather than arguing about what they
mean let me point to a couple more recent publications which highlight
what I think is good about Anderson's article: (06)
E.g. Greg Chaitin's "Omega and why maths has no TOEs" (07)
http://plus.maths.org/issue37/features/omega/ (08)
R. B. Laughlin and David Pines, "The Theory of Everything": (09)
"For better or worse we are now witnessing a transition from the
science of the past, so intimately linked to reductionism, to the
study of complex adaptive matter, firmly based in experiment, with its
hope for providing a jumping-off point for new discoveries, new
concepts, and new wisdom." (010)
http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/cmp-workshop/Forms/laughlinpines.pdf (011)
These guys are surely more technically accurate, but Anderson's
article is still good. It shows such ideas are moving into the
mainstream. (012)
-Rob (013)
On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Rick Murphy <rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Rob & All:
>
> Folks might get a chuckle out of my response to Anderson called "Signs
> of the Singularity and Why Chris Anderson and Nicholas Carr Won't Make
> the Next Cut" here ...
>
> http://phaneron.rickmurphy.org/?p=26
>
> Rick (014)
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