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The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015) (view source)
Revision as of 20:16, 3 February 2023
, 20:16, 3 February 2023no edit summary
On the other hand, Clark’s law of diminishing returns (1900) had no such predictions. They also played no role in the acceptance of Mayer's lunar theory (1760s), Coulomb's inverse square law (early 1800s), the three laws of thermodynamics (1850s), and quantum mechanics (1927).[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 146]]
Barseghyan explains that this indicates that is because "we do expect confirmed novel predictions but only in very special circumstances. There was one common characteristic in all those episodes [...] they all altered our views on the structural elements of the world".[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 146]] For instance, in our key examples, Newton’s proposal of unobservable entities, such as gravity and absolute space, challenged the ''accepted ontology'' of the time, while Clark’s simply accounted for the data already available.
Barseghyan presents his historical hypothesis that this specific requirement for CNP has been employed in natural science since the 18th century. Assuming he is correct (for the sake of argument), he continues thus: "The ''third law'' stipulates that the requirement of confirmed novel predictions could become employed only if it was a deductive consequence of the accepted theories and other employed methods of the time. So a question arises: what theories and methods does this requirement follow from?".[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 147-8]]
Barseghyan answers the question with two principles. For one, there is a principle, implicit in our contemporary mosaic and accepted since the eighteenth century, that states:
