OK. So Newton's law of universal gravitation has been falsified, but not all of Newton's Laws ... or do you believe there are other tests that also falsify those?
I was referring to the Law of Universal Gravitation.
This relates to your comment in post #38 about a law being incomplete vs. wrong. This is exactly Nagel's argument - that one can always claim a law is simply incomplete rather than wrong. Similar to gravitation, Newton's 2nd law assumes instaneous force. The body is rigid and there is no wave travelling through it to transport energy.
But this doesn't mean it's wrong. It is clearly understood that the law only applies to rigid bodies. If energy transport becomes an issue, other forces are added - Hooke's Law for elastic forces, Rayleigh for viscous forces, etc. One can continue to add new forces ad infinitum while never once thinking that such additions falsify the original 2nd law.
I think it is fair to say that some laws are idealized, such as the gas laws. Deviations from the ideal are not considered to be falsifications, but the law is only considered to be an idealized model to begin with. They are not always expected to be accurate to 5 or 6 decimal places. Where there are deviations from the ideal it is understood that the law is wrong, and reality is right. The map is not the territory, as it is often said.
Perhaps a murder trial would be a good analogy in this particular case. Let's say that we have fingerprints, DNA, shoe print, tire print, and fiber evidence to work with. In one example, all of the evidence matches up to the suspect in what appears to be a slam dunk case. The fingerprints on the murder weapon belong to the defendant, and the other evidence is equally compelling. However, we don't know when the murder took place down to the minute. Forensics narrowed it down to a 30 minute window, but they could not place it down to the minute. Does this mean that we our theory as to the murderer is wrong, or incomplete? I would say incomplete. There are still answers to be found, but we have ample evidence that the conclusion is supported by the evidence.
In the second case, the evidence does not match up to the defendant. Instead, they match the husband of the victim. Even the husband's bloody fingerprints are found on the blade used to commit the crime. Like the case above, forensics is not able to narrow down the time of the crime to the exact minute. Is the theory that the defendant is guilty falsified? Absolutely. It is not incomplete. It is wrong. It makes predictions that are seriously contradicted by the evidence.
This is the way I view incomplete and wrong. The "art" of science is the ability to take two hypotheses and figure out an experimental protocol that will differentiate between the hypotheses. The good scientists are those that can not only come up with a good hypothesis, but also a good experiment to test that hypothesis. The names we learn about in high school science are those scientists who came up with those experiments, such as Rutherford who came up with the gold foil experiment.
