Terence Tao

It was just all driven by experiment.

And it took Newton a century later to give a theory that explained all three laws at once.

Traditionally, when we talk about the history of science, idea generation has always been kind of the prestige part of science.

So, I mean, a scientific problem comes with, there's many steps, you know, you have to identify a problem and then you have to identify a good problem to work on, a fruitful problem.

And then you need to collect data.

You need to figure out a strategy to analyze the data, to make a hypothesis.

And at this point, you need to propose a good hypothesis.

And then you need to validate.

And then you need to write things up and explain.

There's a dozen different components.

But the ones we celebrate are these Eureka genius moments of idea generation.

And so Kepler certainly had to, as you say, cycle through many ideas and several which didn't work.

And I bet many that he didn't even publish at all because they just didn't fit.

And that's an important part of the process, trying all kinds of random things and seeing if they worked.

But as you say, they have to be matched by an equal amount of verification, otherwise it's slop.

We celebrate Kepler, but we should also celebrate Brahe for his assiduous data collection, which was 10 times more precise than any previous observation.

And that extra decimal point of accuracy was actually essential for Kepler to get his results.

And he was using Euclidean geometry and the most advanced mathematics he could use at the time to match his models with the data.

So all aspects had to be in play, the data and the theory and the hypothesis generation.

I'm not sure nowadays that hypothesis generation is the bottleneck anymore.