Birds Doing Ornithology: The Role of Beauty in Model Building

"Philosophy of Science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." - Richard Feynman For obvious reasons this provocative quote is not very popular among philosophers of science, but Feynman certainly didn't mean it in bad taste. The fact of the matter is that most science can be done with little to no …

The Empirical Heart of Mathematics

Mathematics is often grouped together with the many other sciences, despite science supposedly being an empirical study of some domain; while math for centuries has been claimed by the rationalists. I argue however that math is indeed a kind of science, albeit a very strange one. While physics is the study of natural laws, chemistry …