Frontier Discovery

• Scientists ultimately put confidence in a hypothesis or a theory if it has been able to withstand empirical or observational attempts to falsify it (Judd, Smith, Kidder, Research Methods in Social Relations (!)).

  • The theory or model must be falsifiable - the experiment must be sensitive to the parameters of the theory or model: Confidence intervals for insensitive experiments are uninformative.
  • It is our duty to be skeptical i.e. to try to falsify or exclude.
  • Good example of falsifiable theory: Z,W± in electroweak unification.

• We don't confirm theories, we fail to break them.