{"id":128,"date":"2006-03-21T07:40:33","date_gmt":"2006-03-21T07:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/21\/good-experimentalists-never-gr\/"},"modified":"2006-03-21T07:40:33","modified_gmt":"2006-03-21T07:40:33","slug":"good-experimentalists-never-gr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/21\/good-experimentalists-never-gr\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Experimentalists Never Grow Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Janet Stemwedel over at Adventures in Science and Ethics has a new post on experiment vs. theory<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Someone makes a comment about hot water making ice cubes faster than cold water. Someone else, familiar with thermodynamics, explains in detail why this cannot be the case. No actual ice cube trays risk harm, since none are ever deployed in resolving the dispute.<\/p>\n

I loves me some thermodynamics. But, why not clear some space in the freezer to do a side-by-side comparison of the ice cube tray filled with hot water and that filled with cold water? Doing an experiment certainly doesn’t preclude making a confident prediction of the outcome from the theory. And, in the event that the results don’t turn out the way you predicted they would, it might help you notice a way that the real system departs from your assumptions about it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(Sean Carroll’s comment to the post is also well worth reading.)<\/p>\n

This is a question near to my heart, and I’ve blogged about the same problem in a physics context<\/a>. It got some, ah, interesting responses, in the comments and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

I do think this reflects a fundamental difference between different branches of physics. There are people for whom a theoretical justification is sufficient, and those for whom theory is never enough, and the experiment is always worthwhile. I’m solidly in the latter camp– nothing in science is as much fun as finding and confirming experimental results that disagree with theory.<\/p>\n

Janet notes that while she is often willing to take theory as proof, her children are never satisfied with that, and always want to do the experiment. So maybe that’s the real difference between theorists and experimentalists– experimentalists are just children at heart.<\/p>\n

It would certainly explain a lot of True Lab Stories<\/a>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Janet Stemwedel over at Adventures in Science and Ethics has a new post on experiment vs. theory: Someone makes a comment about hot water making ice cubes faster than cold water. Someone else, familiar with thermodynamics, explains in detail why this cannot be the case. No actual ice cube trays risk harm, since none are… Continue reading Good Experimentalists Never Grow Up<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-science","category-string_theory","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}