What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

“My theory has been falsified!” But it ain’t necessarily so. Despite the fact that the remote still isn’t working, it’s still possible that the old batteries were dead. Maybe the new batteries are dead too. Maybe a rat gnawed through the TV’s power cable while Popper was at the corner store. Maybe the laws of physics actually change depending on where you are, and while Popper was at the store, the Solar System moved through its orbit around the center of the Milky Way and entered a patch of space where the laws of electromagnetism that govern the behavior of batteries in remote controls are different. The problem is that Popper’s “dead battery theory” of his remote control doesn’t actually make any predictions on its own: it only makes predictions in conjunction with a huge number of other basic assumptions that Popper has made about the functioning of the world. So Popper is wrong: his theory was not falsified.

Popper