In praise of Popper

 

A nice pic from the Caldey Island Facebook page -- it reminded me of Karl Popper's exhortation to scientists that they should concentrate their efforts on the falsification of existing hypotheses.  The famous example of course is the hypothesis that "All swans are white" --  which was widely accepted as correct, of course, long ago, until somebody discovered that some swans are black as well.

This was one of the themes of by talk in Fishguard last night -- I urged people not to blindly "follow the science" (as we were exhorted to do during the dark days of the Pandemic) but to knowledgeably challenge the science presented in learned papers and especially to take everything presented in banner headlines in the media with a large dose of salt.

My main theme, of course, was that we should all recognise mythology for what it is, especially when it is dressed up as science.  But more of that anon......