Science
A scientific concept is said to be wrong if it can be used to make specific predictions of the results of experiments, but those predictions do not correspond with physical reality (i.e., the concept can be falsified in the Popperian sense, and has also been shown to be false). Wolfgang Pauli is said to have coined the phrase "not even wrong" to describe concepts that cannot be falsified (either because they do not refer to measurable effects, or because they are too incoherent to be used to make predictions).
Read more about this topic: Wrong
Famous quotes containing the word science:
“The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)