the.com/falsification
the only test science respects: a theory must risk being wrong to be right
means The act of proving something false, or of deliberately faking or altering data to deceive — the same word doing double duty for honest disproof and dishonest fraud.
from From Latin 'falsus' (false, deceived), past participle of 'fallere' (to deceive, to trip up), plus the '-fication' suffix from 'facere' (to make) — so literally 'a making-false.' It came into English through Medieval Latin 'falsificare' and French. The philosophical sense — a theory must be capable of being shown false to count as science — was sharpened in the 20th century by Karl Popper, who turned this old word for fakery into the cornerstone of how knowledge proves itself honest.
- popper's blade
- if nothing could disprove it, it isn't science
- one shot
- a single failed prediction can topple a thousand confirmations
- black swan
- all swans white died from one Australian bird
- forgery cousin
- same word covers faked documents and rigorous proof
- unfalsifiable
- astrology survives by predicting absolutely everything
piltdown man hoax — fraudulent fossil presented as human ancestor in 1912 england, exposed as fake in 1953
wakefield vaccine autism study — 1998 medical paper linking mmr vaccine to autism, retracted 2010 after data falsification found
hwang woo-suk stem cells — south korean scientist fabricated human cloning data in 2004-2005, causing international scandal