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Richard Feynman The Meaning Of It All
Atec Февраль 27 2008 22:52:48
Книга только для ознакомления
. The interpretation of a result is an example. To take a trivial instance, there is a famous joke about a man who complains to a friend of a mysterious phenomenon. The white horses on his farm eat more than the black horses. He worries about this and cannot understand it, until his friend suggests that maybe he has more white horses than black ones.
It sounds ridiculous, but think how many times similar mistakes are made in judgments of various kinds. You say, "My sister had a cold, and in two weeks ..." It is one of those cases, if you think about it, in which there were more white horses. Scientific reasoning requires a certain discipline, and we should try to teach this discipline, because even on the lowest level such errors are unnecessary today.
Another important characteristic of science is its objectivity. It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another. You perform the experiment several times, and because of irregularities, like pieces of dirt falling in, the result varies from time to time. You do not have everything under control. You like the result to be a certain way, so the times it comes out that way, you say, "See, it comes out this particular way." The next time you do the experiment it comes out different. Maybe there was a piece of dirt in it the first time, but you ignore it
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