The scientific method is only a few hundred years old. This continues to amaze me. It seems so obvious, now, that you should go and test your theories and, if necessary, revise them. But for much of human history, coming up with a “theory” was all about story-telling and sense-making, not about making quantitatively accurate predictions.

Then again, the scientific method is not set in stone. Scientists and philosophers both are still trying to understand just how to identify the best hypothesis or when to discard one. This is not as trivial as it sounds, and this difficulty is well illustrated by the Raven Paradox, put forward by the German philosopher Carl Gustav Hempel in the 1940s.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Sabine