Until the twentieth century, scientists made observations and experiments and theoreticians looked for theories which explained them, which could then be tested against further experiments and observations. Lost in Math is a very powerful analysis of what has gone wrong in the way that some aspects of physics are undertaken. (Hossenfelder gives Hoyle's cosmological theory short shrift, incidentally, though, to be fair, it wasn't given anywhere near as many opportunities to be patched up to match observations as the current version of big bang with inflation.) In the very readable Lost in Math, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder exposes the way that in certain areas of physics, this is all too realistic a picture. It shows a large flock of geese all following each other, which he likened to the state of theoretical physics. One of my favourite illustrations from a science title was in Fred Hoyle's book on his quasi-steady state theory.
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