unobservable
11science, philosophy of — Branch of philosophy that attempts to elucidate the nature of scientific inquiry observational procedures, patterns of argument, methods of representation and calculation, metaphysical presuppositions and evaluate the grounds of their validity… …
12Comte and positivism — Robert Brown COMTE’S AIMS The chief aim of all of Auguste Comte’s publications, and the constant mission of his entire working life, was the improvement of human character through the perfecting of human society. He was convinced that the… …
13Errors and residuals in statistics — For other senses of the word residual , see Residual. In statistics and optimization, statistical errors and residuals are two closely related and easily confused measures of the deviation of a sample from its theoretical value . The error of a… …
14Rao–Blackwell theorem — In statistics, the Rao–Blackwell theorem is a result which characterizes the transformation of an arbitrarily crude estimator into an estimator that is optimal by the mean squared error criterion or any of a variety of similar criteria. The Rao… …
15Scientific realism — is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. Within philosophy of science, it is often framed as an answer to the question what does the… …
16Anti-realism — In philosophy, the term anti realism is used to describe anyposition involving either the denial of an objective reality of entities of a certain type or the denial that verification transcendent statements about a type of entity are either true… …
17Cosmic inflation — In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation is the idea that the universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion that was driven by a negative pressure vacuum energy density. [Liddle and Lyth (2000) and Mukhanov (2005) are recent cosmology… …
18Control theory — For control theory in psychology and sociology, see control theory (sociology) and Perceptual Control Theory. The concept of the feedback loop to control the dynamic behavior of the system: this is negative feedback, because the sensed value is… …
19Factor analysis — is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved, uncorrelated variables called factors. In other words, it is possible, for example, that variations in …
20Fine-tuned Universe — The fine tuned Universe is the idea that the conditions that allow life in the Universe can only occur when certain universal physical constants lie within a very narrow range, so that if any of several fundamental constants were only slightly… …
