Exactly what is theory all about?

[kurious]

Wouldn't it have made more sense to say to people on TD that a decent theory takes a long time to develop and that people can start one new thread every month or two months or whatever? This seems to me the best way forward and could not be construed as unfair or unreasonable by anyone.

 

[quantumdude]

Wouldn't it have made more sense to say to people on TD that a decent theory takes a long time to develop and that people can start one new thread every month or two months or whatever? This seems to me the best way forward and could not be construed as unfair or unreasonable by anyone.

No, it wouldn't make more sense. This move was not made to reduce the volume of posts in Theory Development, it was made to maintain the scientific integrity of Physics Forums. It would not be in line with that goal to permit ill-formulated theories, no matter how infrequent.

 

[jcsd]

Wouldn't it have made more sense to say to people on TD that a decent theory takes a long time to develop and that people can start one new thread every month or two months or whatever? This seems to me the best way forward and could not be construed as unfair or unreasonable by anyone.

I can't speak for the admin, but I don't see why anyone would object to the posting of any theory, that was backed up with sound physical reasoning and if necessary experimental evidence.

But nobody wants crackpot theories, except the crackpots.

 

[kurious]

Stephen Hawking doesn't think the Higgs particle will be found and if it is not there is no theory to replace the Higgs for mass generation.So if the Higgs isn't found by accelerator experiments, and someone posts an alternative theory on TD,
how will you know if they are a crackpot or not when the Higgs theory which is recognised as a logical and reasonable path to follow, fails to be verified by experiment? I think that stephen Hawking could post whatever quality of material he wanted on TD and if you knew it was him you wouldn't criticize it because you
wouldn't be confident enough in yourself to challenge him and would think that
even though something seemed to be rubbish,he must know better than you.
A true story:
There was a room full of the world's greatest chess players all chatting freely
about the game of chess.Into the room walked one of the great Russian masters of chess ( can't remember his name!).Everyone stopped talking.They were scared he was going to tell them they were talking through their asses! If you can tell me that
you would have the nerve and intelligence to argue with Hawking,Witten,Higgs
or even someone who has done an unusual but highly successful bit of curve fitting as Mordechai Milgrom has done with MOND, then I would find your judgement of many of the people on TD more convincing even though it might still be wrong.

 

[jcsd]

Kurious, physics forum is hardly has the most rigourous standars on the net, compoare the the modreate newsgroup here , infact I know of another physics bulketin board that won't accept any personal theory unless it has been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal.

if I do not have enough physicla knowledge to evalute a theory I don't evalute it, it's as simple as that. As I said that any theory that can be reasonably justifed will not annoy people, but you must relaize that the neraly all theories in TD are compet wastes of time and it is highly theory devlopent will ever produce a single useful theory.

 

[kurious]

I agree that it is unlikely that TD will produce a single useful theory because
even professional physicists with decades of experience struggle to do that.
But you could raise the standard on TD to any level you wanted and only accept
posts from posters with Professorships at Harvard,Oxford,Stanford etc. and still never get a single useful theory.

 

[bino]

im going to have to agree with jcsd. if someone is able to back up what they say then should be aloud to post it.

 

[bino]

think of how many scientist were consitered crackpots before they proved their theory.