Angier does give a very good explanation of what physicists mean by force, but I was disappointed to see early on the status given to the position of those such as Sir Richard Peto on data mining or exploratory data analysis. There is every difference between using statistical ‘significance’ to look for answers, & looking for questions or generating new hypotheses. I would go so far as to say that not analysing expensively acquired data thoroughly is a dereliction of duty - but that assertion does rather depend on how you defined the population to be studied & then selected your sample
And if I get really cross I might say that medical researchers will one day come to realise their dereliction in not always looking to see if there is a difference between the results for males & females
Even a 'significant' correlation with signs of the zodiac is not necessarily spurious. If I said that Leos are bad at exams, Peto might scoff, but even Ed Balls believes that late summer babies tend to do worse in exams because our academic year means they are always the baby of the class
On a related issue, I heard Professor Jim Al-Khalili say, on World Service Forum, that perhaps the continuing problems with physics might stem from the fact that we cannot observe the system from outside, citing Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. I had never thought to link Heisenberg to Gödel & Archimedes in this way
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