Abstract

In his classic paper entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Eugene Wigner addresses the question of why the language of Mathematics should prove so remarkably effective in the physical [natural] sciences. He marvels that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.” We have been similarly struck by the outsized benefits that theory based instrument calibrations convey on the natural sciences, in contrast with the almost universal practice in the social sciences of using data to calibrate instrumentation.

Details

Title
The unreasonable effectiveness of theory based instrument calibration in the natural sciences: What can the social sciences learn?
Author
Stenner, A J 1 ; Stone, M H 2 ; Fisher, W P, Jr 3 

 Chief Scientist, MetaMetrics, Inc., Durham, North Carolina, USA 
 Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Aurora University, Aurora, Illinois, USA 
 Research Associate, BEAR Center, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA 
Publication year
2018
Publication date
Jun 2018
Publisher
IOP Publishing
ISSN
17426588
e-ISSN
17426596
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2572347619
Copyright
© 2018. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.