Jeff Cook's Gravity & Zero Point Energy Physics

Principle of Parsimony, also known as Ockham's Razor: "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum" - Translation: "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity", William of Ockham (1280-1349). If you're anything like me, which God help you if you are, you may have heard many interpretations / misinterpretations of this now famous guideline of modern physics. The film, "Contact," based on Carl Sagan's novel of the same title, additionally helped bring these now psuedo-sacred words to the household minds of the layman. Unfortunately, in terms of the scientific community, it is occassionally used as an argument for one's own theory while too often warping the true meaning behind the statement, particularly when there are no experimental results of any kind by which to verify the hypothesis or "theory" in the first place.

In the aforementioned film, the Razor is explained to mean something like, all things being equal, the simpler of the two opposing hypothesis tends to be the right one. Also, one may have heard it explained as, when two or more hypotheses explain the same result but with different interpretations, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions tends to be the most viable.

Well, which is the right interpretation? Or are they the same? Or perhaps there are others? In the following pages, you will hopefully come to develop such answers for yourself; and likely, your perspective on this subject may be quite deeper, perhaps vastly different than what you currently suspect. It was an eye-opener for me the first time I dove into scientific analysis, particularly when working with others on the more mysterious of topics, such as gravity and zero point energy to name but two.