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→Occam's Razor
Einstein and Vulcan is not an example of Occam's Razor. Occam's razor states that new phenomena should not be introduced if existing explanations suffice. Planets were already well-known, so the observations were very plausibly explained by an undiscovered planet. This was the going idea for about 50 years before Einstein came along. Imagine you are in a Newtonian world filled with excitement over continual uncovering of new knowledge of planets. Now here are some observations that seem to suggest a new planet, but there's this crazy physicist nut who says it's due to space itself actually ''bending''. In that case, Occam's razor would suggest that this relativity idea was bogus, because we perceive space as flat and Newtonian physics explains every other observation to the degree of accuracy possible at that time. Thus as additional planet was not a new ''phenomenon'', just another physical entity within the then-known physical framework of the universe, whereas relativity represented an entire reshaping of our understanding of the universe. However, the math of relativity fully explained the orbital anomaly, so that explanation survived. The idea of Vulcan was then discarded because there were no longer any unexplained effects which could accommodate it. It was a questions of alternatives, not additions. [[User:Kallium|Kallium]] 23:38, 22 October 2008 (EDT)
Einstein and Vulcan is not an example of Occam's Razor. Occam's razor states that new phenomena should not be introduced if existing explanations suffice. Planets were already well-known, so the observations were very plausibly explained by an undiscovered planet. This was the going idea for about 50 years before Einstein came along. Imagine you are in a Newtonian world filled with excitement over continual uncovering of new knowledge of planets. Now here are some observations that seem to suggest a new planet, but there's this crazy physicist nut who says it's due to space itself actually ''bending''. In that case, Occam's razor would suggest that this relativity idea was bogus, because we perceive space as flat and Newtonian physics explains every other observation to the degree of accuracy possible at that time. Thus as additional planet was not a new ''phenomenon'', just another physical entity within the then-known physical framework of the universe, whereas relativity represented an entire reshaping of our understanding of the universe. However, the math of relativity fully explained the orbital anomaly, so that explanation survived. The idea of Vulcan was then discarded because there were no longer any unexplained effects which could accommodate it. It was a questions of alternatives, not additions. [[User:Kallium|Kallium]] 23:38, 22 October 2008 (EDT)
: You ignore the following key point about the [[Vulcan (planet)|Vulcan]] controversy. An undiscovered planet is one thing, but an undiscovered planet that, while ''inside the orbit of [[earth]] around the [[sun]], still would keep station on the far side of the sun from the earth'', is quite another. In inventing this new planet, astronomers seem to have forgotten everything they knew about planets since [[Johannes Kepler]] formulated his Laws of Planetary Motion—simply because Vulcan would have violated the most important of these, which is:
: <math>T^2 \propto R^3</math>
: How could Vulcan and Earth have had identical orbital periods if Vulcan's mean orbital radius were smaller even than that of [[Mercury]]? (And for Vulcan always to remain on the far side of the sun, and hence unobservable from earth, Vulcan and Earth would have had to have the same period.)
: In contrast, Einstein provided the simpler explanation: that the astronomers' understanding of the physics of planetary motion was in error, and that the error lay in the understanding of the motion of Mercury, not the motion of any hypothetical planet inside the orbit of Mercury.
: Therefore, [[Occam's Razor]] dis apply. And more to the point, Occam's Razor now descends like the former French National Razor to lop off the head of the dark-matter theory.--[[User:TerryH|TerryH]]<sup>[[User talk:TerryH|Talk]]</sup> 20:38, 15 January 2009 (EST)