De Revolutionibus Orbium

Recién inicio la lectura de A brief history of time, de Stephen Hawking. Reproduciré aquí ideas suyas en torno a una definición operativa de teoría, en alusión al poder explicativo que tiene la ciencia sobre el mundo continente/contenido en el que vivimos.

"A theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality. A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. [The first requirement is that i]t must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. [The second is that] any physical theory is always provisional, in the senses that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory [...].

In practice, what often happens is that a new theory is really an extension of the previous theory [...].

The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe. However, the approach most scientists actually follow is to separate the problem into two parts. First, there are the laws that tell us how the universe changes with time. (If we know what the universe is like at any one time, these physical laws tell us how it will look at any later time). Second, there is the question of the initial state of the universe. Some people feel that science should be concerned with only the first part; they regard the question of the initial situation as a matter for metaphysics or religion. They would say that God, being omnipotent, could have started the universe off any way he wanted. That may be so, but in any case he also could have made it develop in a completely arbitrary way. Yet it appears that he chose to make it evolve in a very regular way according to certain laws. It therefore seems equally reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the initial state".

HAWKING, Stephen. (1998). A brief history of time. New York: Bantam.

P. D. Prometo solemnemente JAMÁS involucrarme en un debate de religión, ciencia y laicismo. La religión es irrebatible, la fe es una pregunta que se responde unívocamente. La ciencia es una construcción interminable. El laicismo (quizá lo menos discutible, dada nuestra tradición occidental a favor del estado no confesional) es una posición política. Lo que nunca sobrará en mi maleta de valores es practicar vehementemente tolerancia y respeto. Sea.