synthesis

I spent part of the day working through Peebles's latest proto-draft of our synthesis of the evidence for and against the cold-dark-matter paradigm. Peebles nicely laid out (in a philosophical introduction) the difference between adaption and falsification. These are two approaches when one has a dominant model and a lot of phenomenology that is only tied to that model through indirect links, as with evolution in biology and cosmology in physics. Adapters try to learn about the indirect links by adjusting them until there is agreement between the fundamental theory and the data; adapters believe the fundamental model. We, of course, are falsifiers: we believe that you make most progress in this situation by trying to construct empirical tests that are capable of falsifying the fundamental hypotheses.