I see this term float around the internet a lot but to this day the Google definitions have done nothing but confuse me further
EDIT: OMG I didn’t expect this post to blow up in just a few hours! Thank you all for making such clear and easy to follow explanations, and thank you for the awards!
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The simplest answer is the most *likely* answer.
As an example – when looking at the orbits of the planets from the view of Earth – the counter-intuitive *simplest* answer was that we are the center of the universe and all in the heavens rotates around us. Right? It wasn’t DUMB to conclude this. From our vantage point on Earth – it *appears* so.
But, on careful study – the planets (which means “wanderers” do not orbit around us.
In order to compensate for the apparent wandering orbit of the planets around Earth, early astronomers came up with increasing complex models that had the planets doing little loops and pirouettes in the sky in order to explain why they sometimes changed direction and became “unpredictable.”
In that case though – the more complex the models became, the more problems they introduced.
The actual SIMPLEST solution was “the Earth is not the center of the Universe.”
Once you put the sun at the center of the solar system, the stars outside of it, and the planets in their proper order around the sun – everything falls into place and the models start to work flawlessly.
And though the rejection of this idea is often chalked up to religious dogma – part of it was that it disputed the status quo/conventional wisdom of the time. It asked people to reject what they were certain of and think outside the box of what they thought they knew. People get into mental “sunk costs” that cause them to double down on bad ideas rather than determine that maybe they have to start over from scratch. Whenever you hear someone assert modern science as an absolute authority on a matter – remind yourself of this. Just because everyone in a scientific field of study *agrees* on an issue, does not mean their belief is accurate. Likely the most recent high profile example was dinosaurs as cold blooded relatives of lizards vs. warm blooded relatives of birds. This idea met with fierce opposition when it was first proposed – and that early dismissal was never really acknowledged when they discovered fossils with FEATHERS in China shortly thereafter.
Science is not static. It is not irrefutable. It is not infallible. But often, if you find that you have to make increasingly complex, post-hoc adjustments to your hypothesis in order to make it work – if it is becoming increasingly complicated – you are probably headed down the wrong path. That is Occam’s razor. The more increasing complexity involved in making your guess fit, the less likely your guess is to be right.
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