There’s a trivial sense in which that is correct—physics doesn’t have much in the way of cladistics, for example—but I suspect that there’s some cause to be thoughtful about this. Even in engineering, a field so ad-hoc-happy that nuclear-grade duct tape is a real product, in the one situation I know of where models without underlying mechanisms were used, the models simply failed.
There’s no requirement that mechanisms be fundamental. If I’m running hot water through a cold pipe at high enough speed, the Dittus-Boelter equation:
is a mechanism, even though it doesn’t even tell me the temperature distribution in a cross-section of the pipe. It starts with physics) and goes through empirical testing to produce a result. But it’s a reliable result, it parallels the behavior of the physical system at the level it models, and as a result I can design my car radiator or steam power plant or liquid electronic chip cooler and expect it to work.
And that’s even more like physics than anything Platt or Burfoot proposed. So I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss these kinds of remarks as sneering.
There’s a trivial sense in which that is correct—physics doesn’t have much in the way of cladistics, for example—but I suspect that there’s some cause to be thoughtful about this. Even in engineering, a field so ad-hoc-happy that nuclear-grade duct tape is a real product, in the one situation I know of where models without underlying mechanisms were used, the models simply failed.
There’s no requirement that mechanisms be fundamental. If I’m running hot water through a cold pipe at high enough speed, the Dittus-Boelter equation:
is a mechanism, even though it doesn’t even tell me the temperature distribution in a cross-section of the pipe. It starts with physics) and goes through empirical testing to produce a result. But it’s a reliable result, it parallels the behavior of the physical system at the level it models, and as a result I can design my car radiator or steam power plant or liquid electronic chip cooler and expect it to work.
And that’s even more like physics than anything Platt or Burfoot proposed. So I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss these kinds of remarks as sneering.