🚀 go-pugleaf

In fact, from a History of Science perspective, a great deal of
Science as we know it was Invented before it was Discovered.
By this I mean that models are made in someone's mind before
supporting evidence confirms the model, and sometimes, you
don't even need good evidence!

A great example (but certainly not a global proof) is that
the "roll a ball down an inclined track" experiment
where Galileo produced the data which shows that gravity
is an inverse-square law ( but he didn't seem to recognize it) is
essentially unrepeatable - you cannot get his recorded data to
the stated accuracy from his experiment, no way, no how,
and physicists have tried for many, many years with increasingly
subtle apparatus.  The data, however, is EXACTLY right!

The inescapable conclusion is that he KNEW, or rather had 
DECIDED, what the outcome should be and cooked the numbers to fit!  
Historical irony: If Galileo had realized that a sequence
of numbers where the difference between consecutive elements is
the odd integers in order is, in fact, the sequence n**2,
he might well have "discovered" inverse square gravitation.
As it is, he merely invented it, but didn't discover it.

And Galileo is certainly NOT alone in doing things like this...

	-Mike O'Dell

PS - Plug for a different discipline - History of Science is the study
of How New Things (really) Happen.  I learned a LOT more about the nature of
Computer Science as an intellectual enterprise by taking
HoS courses than I learned in CS courses. Fascinating reading...

PPS - favorite quote: Johannes Kepler on why after years and year of calculation
which he *almost* made work out, he abandoned the epicycle-on-a-deferent
model for orbits and adopted ellipses instead by explaining:

	"It was not sufficiently pleasing to my mind."

Powerful stuff, that mind business.