Cornell Team Says It's Unified the Structure of Scientific Theories 115
An anonymous reader writes "Cornell physicists say they've codified why science works, or more specifically, why scientific theories work – a meta-theory. Publishing online in the journal Science (abstract), the team has developed a unified computational framework they say exposes the hidden hierarchy of scientific theories by quantifying the degree to which predictions – like how a particular cellular mechanism might work under certain conditions, or how sound travels through space – depend on the detailed variables of a model."
Long answer (Score:5, Informative)
in the paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6738 [arxiv.org]
Re:Theories about science... (Score:4, Informative)
If you take as axiomatic that all science should go solely in a science journal, and all discussion about science should go solely in a philosophy journal, and there exists science which is also a discussion about science -- then where should it go?
The authors are making the claim that science can be used to discuss science, and they back it up with a decent analysis. Either their claim is wrong, or your axioms are wrong. You can't make this go away just by waving your hands about definitions.
PS. Original definition of metaphysics was "the chapter in the book that came after [greek: "meta"] the chapter on physics". So no, not metaphysics by this definition either :)