Jordan Berkowitz

That’s Just Like Your Reality, Man.

A few days ago I posted an excerpt from a recent article by Stephen Hawking in Scientific American that really resonated with me.

In our view, there is no picture– or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If two models agree with observation, neither one can be considered more real than the other.

Being the commensurate geek, I couldn’t help but feel that this was a particularly pointed scientific argument that had been previously articulated by none other than the Dude.