> But I don't think that it is inherently bad for one to say "Model Y predicts X".
I do. Not because the sentence in and off itself is bad, but rather because when the sentence is repeated it gets changed to "We know X because of Y."
> Physics will always be a model.
Maybe we have different meanings for the word model.
I suspect you are using the word model like a "model car". i.e. a description of what something is.
I mean it in the term of "model these variables", ie. use a computer to put in variables and hope you programmed everything correctly and get a result of what will happen.
I'm not using it in the descriptive sense, but rather the action sense.
> I don't see the problem with saying "this model turned out to be wrong so we need to come up with a better one" (exactly what's happening in the article).
Nothing wrong with saying that, but that's not what actually happened. Instead the model of the boundary was taught as fact (for example I expect that if you read the wikipedia article on it from 5 years ago it would talk as if we had a pretty good idea of what the boundary looked like).
If, it was simply used to decide which experiments to prioritize on the spacecraft that would be fine. But that's not all that the model was used for.
I'm sure in the original they were careful to call it a model, and an idea, etc. But in wider use (even scientific articles) it was understood as fact.
I do. Not because the sentence in and off itself is bad, but rather because when the sentence is repeated it gets changed to "We know X because of Y."
> Physics will always be a model.
Maybe we have different meanings for the word model.
I suspect you are using the word model like a "model car". i.e. a description of what something is.
I mean it in the term of "model these variables", ie. use a computer to put in variables and hope you programmed everything correctly and get a result of what will happen.
I'm not using it in the descriptive sense, but rather the action sense.
> I don't see the problem with saying "this model turned out to be wrong so we need to come up with a better one" (exactly what's happening in the article).
Nothing wrong with saying that, but that's not what actually happened. Instead the model of the boundary was taught as fact (for example I expect that if you read the wikipedia article on it from 5 years ago it would talk as if we had a pretty good idea of what the boundary looked like).
If, it was simply used to decide which experiments to prioritize on the spacecraft that would be fine. But that's not all that the model was used for.
I'm sure in the original they were careful to call it a model, and an idea, etc. But in wider use (even scientific articles) it was understood as fact.