“Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all”.
‘All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.’ Have we reached a time where all of our tool-sets are now made moot by vast clouds of information and strictly applied maths?”
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/25/146250
The main article is here: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory . The comments even appear to be more interesting.
A reaction to this is here:http://miningdrugs.blogspot.com/2008/08/data-models-or-both.html
And Geoff sent me this link on same matter early this week:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php
It ends by saying this:
“Models are not perfect,” says Syd Levitus. “Data are not perfect. Theory isn’t perfect. We shouldn’t expect them to be. It’s the combination of models, data, and theory that lead to improvements in our science, in our understanding of phenomena.”
What is a model?
