[Corpora-List] No poverty of the stimulus

[Rob Freeman]

Hi All,

Couldn't resist putting another spin on this.

On Jan 7, 2008 2:55 AM, Nicholas Sanders <nix at semiotek.org> wrote:
> 1887 - according to Wikipedia.
>
>
> On 6 Jan 2008, at 18:50, Yorick Wilks wrote:
> (1906?)

One reason for confusion over the date of the M&M experiment is that
when the original expt failed to demonstrate the expected result,
scientists just kept on repeating it.

People certainly didn't say "Gosh, we can't measure a speed through
the ether, well I guess time and space must be relative then."

No, they got a bit more funding and kept on looking. They kept looking
for what they could not find for 20 years or more. They were much more
willing to believe there was an error in their methods than they were
to believe there was an error in their assumptions.*

I too like this experiment, not because it demonstrates
falsifiability, but because I think it provides a nice parallel with
our own resistance to falsifiability in our efforts to find absolute
grammars. Which have continued for some 50 years after the first hints
there are none to be found.

-Rob

*To his credit it seems Michelson was pretty up front: "The result of
the hypothesis of a stationary ether is thus shown to be incorrect."
A. A. Michelson, Am. J. Sci, 122, 120 (1881), according to
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/mmhist.html.

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