{"id":169710,"date":"2023-08-15T03:26:39","date_gmt":"2023-08-15T08:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/sharpening-occams-razor-the-mathematical-quest-to-simplify-science"},"modified":"2023-08-15T03:26:39","modified_gmt":"2023-08-15T08:26:39","slug":"sharpening-occams-razor-the-mathematical-quest-to-simplify-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/sharpening-occams-razor-the-mathematical-quest-to-simplify-science","title":{"rendered":"Sharpening \u201cOccam\u2019s Razor\u201d \u2014 The Mathematical Quest To Simplify Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/sharpening-occams-razor-the-mathematical-quest-to-simplify-science.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In science, the simplest explanations often hold the most truth, a concept known as \u201cOccam\u2019s Razor.\u201d This principle has shaped scientific thought for centuries, but when dealing with abstract ideas, how do we evaluate them?<\/p>\n<p>In a new paper, philosophers from <a href=\"https:\/\/scitechdaily.com\/tag\/uc-santa-barbara\/\">UC Santa Barbara<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/scitechdaily.com\/tag\/uc-irvine\/\">UC Irvine<\/a> discuss how to weigh the complexity of scientific theories by comparing their underlying mathematics. They aim to characterize the amount of structure a theory has using symmetry \u2014 or the aspects of an object that remain the same when other changes are made.<\/p>\n<p>After much discussion, the authors ultimately doubt that symmetry will provide the framework they need. However, they do uncover why it\u2019s such an excellent guide for understanding structure. Their paper appears in the journal <em>Synthese<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In science, the simplest explanations often hold the most truth, a concept known as \u201cOccam\u2019s Razor.\u201d This principle has shaped scientific thought for centuries, but when dealing with abstract ideas, how do we evaluate them? In a new paper, philosophers from UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine discuss how to weigh the complexity of scientific [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,224],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}