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→Occam's Razor: new section
: Would you care to summarize the article or provide a link to the published paper (rather than a summary of the paper)? --[[User:Mtur|Mtur]] 18:32, 23 April 2007 (EDT)
: Would you care to summarize the article or provide a link to the published paper (rather than a summary of the paper)? --[[User:Mtur|Mtur]] 18:32, 23 April 2007 (EDT)
::Here is an article about the so called "dark matter" written by [[Creation Ministries International]]: http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4626/ [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 20:36, 2 September 2007 (EDT)
::Here is an article about the so called "dark matter" written by [[Creation Ministries International]]: http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4626/ [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 20:36, 2 September 2007 (EDT)
== 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 not because of Occam's razor but 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)