Items filtered by date: August 2023

Reflections on the Informative and the Deceptive Similarity

In physics - and in the natural sciences in general - similarity models are methods that exploit the similarity of certain properties of objects or processes, and can be useful to better understand a less well known object or process, assuming that other unknown properties can be inferred from the similarity. Of course, the similarity itself may be wrong, but even if it is true, we may not be able to infer other similarities well. Nevertheless, the recognition of similarities is one of the most important scientific methods of gaining knowledge, alongside the search for related symmetries.

I'm not thinking about deceptive similarities now, I'm more interested in informative similarities, and among them those that are clearly visible in a given case, but which we overlook or, if we do notice them, think are irrelevant, perhaps deceptive.

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