Thank you for tuning in to this season about the physics of life's emergence. Whether you agree with Walker and her Assembly Theory or not, before you draw your own conclusions, please allow me to share a few words from Thomas Levenson about the scientific method—our North Star in exploring the world.
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Richard Feynman said that science is simply “a special method of finding things out.” But what makes it special? The way its answers get confirmed or denied: “Observation is the judge” - the only judge, as the catechism goes - “of whether something is so or not.”
There is a strange magic to the term: “the scientific method.” At a minimum, it asserts a particular kind of authority: here is a systematic approach, a set of rules, that when followed will reliability advance our understanding of the material world. Such knowledge, though, is always provisional, a seeming weakness that is the real strength of science: every idea, every generalization, every assumption is subject to question, to challenge, to refutation.
The scientific method requires that a hypothesis be ruled out or modified if its predictions are clearly and repeatedly incompatible with experimental tests. No matter how elegant a theory is, its predications must agree with experimental results if we are to believe that it is a valid description of nature. In physics, as in every experimental science, “experiment is supreme.”
However, does history behave like that? Do human beings? No. Real life and cherished fables routinely diverge.
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