A note on 'significance'. There is an important rift between the social sciences and the hard sciences, wrt what is 'significant'.
In the social sciences 'significance' is quite relaxed. Eg in drug-testing the bare 'evidence' of some effect to be above chance-level is considered 'significant', and eventually earns you a lot of money. In the hard physical sciences and engineering this is different. a) in engineering one always takes probabilities into account. A chance of 60% of a bridge breaking down is rarely acceptable. b) in physics one has two basic areas: b1) DETECTION OF EFFECTS, with a somewhat relaxed relationship wrt the strength of an effect. (this is ofcourse experimental physics. Dealing with 'reality' is dirty business.) b2) IDENTIFICATION OF FUNDAMENTALS (constants and laws). e=mc2 etc. Fundamentals have to be PRECISE not only to an abitrary number of digits, but LOGICALLY/MATHEMATICALLY precise. (this is You guessed, theoretical phyics) This is a basic axiom of most physics, and leads to a tendency to transform the universe into something platonic, i.e. a set of logical relationships between mathematical entities. Laughlin is one of the rare Nobel laureates, who questioned that ( 'why are there laws?' ). Maybe Josephson also. There are several stings in the flesh of the wannabe-Platonists, eg entropy, the arrow of time, consciousness and several obscure effects, which are dutifully ignored for the sake of preserving the worldview. In this sense, Einstein was a Platonist, Heisenberg a party-pooper to the Platonists, Whitehead a recovering logician. How dangerous it is to be a Platonist, can eg be seen with Goedel and his brothers in mind. See here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5122859998068380459 Guenter
