Philosophers of science tend to want to see scientific theories as true. I sometimes point out that Boyle’s law is false. Some time ago, I wrote an earlier post saying that Kepler’s laws are false. In this post, I want to paint a picture of where truth and information fit into science.
The stopped clock
You have probably heard the saying, “a stopped clock is right twice per day”. And, along the same lines, we can say that a clock which is 1 minute slow is always wrong. However, you would probably prefer to have a clock that is 1 minute slow, than to have a stopped clock.
“Right” and “wrong” here are references to truth. The example of the stopped clock suggests that there is more to science than truth.
We can, instead, look at it in terms of information. The clock that is 1 minute slow is actually giving pretty good information about time. It isn’t perfect information, but it is good enough to be useful for many purposes. The stopped clock, by contrast, does not provide any useful information. Yes, twice per day it has the correct information. But that stopped clock cannot tell us whether this happens to be the time of day when it is correct. Since it does not tell us that, we cannot trust the time as reported by the stopped clock. It is, at best, useless information.
The Heretical Philosopher 