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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Summary Sentence: Using science to predict the future: An interactive discussion of induction and scientific reasoning
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SolomontomIn the 17th Century, there was a profound scientific revolution, as first Galileo and then Isaac Newton overturned the commonly-accepted Aristotelian principles and replaced them with what we now call the laws of “Classical Physics.” The success of Newton’s Laws was so overwhelming that it led to an explosion of scientific research and engineering that changed society in a fundamental way. But why is it that Newton’s results were so successful? What can we learn from classical laws of physics, or from any scientific law? What can scientific principles tell us about the future? And how is it that we really know anything about the universe around us? In this talk, we will briefly review the history of scientific thought and then – through an interactive, audience-participation challenge – discuss the philosophy of David Hume, a skeptic from the early 18th Century whose philosophical theories cast doubt on the rational basis for all of scientific inquiry.
