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On Monday, March 16, 2015 at 3:26:43 PM UTC-6, Robert Peirce wrote:
On 3/15/15 10:20 PM, ScottW wrote:
If you believe this...then nothing is truly known, and that
includes what you "also know".

Yep. The one thing that is required of a scientific theory is that it
must be possible to prove it is false. It is considered valid until
that point.

The term is "falsifiable."

To banish static, Armstrong turned to frequency
modulation, bucking the accepted (and mathematically
"proven") wisdom of the day that FM offered no
advantage over AM.

Really? Care to cite these specific mathematical proofs?

I think you're confusing science with politics and business.
It's never been beyond people with financial or political
motives to make fraudulent scientific claims. Big money
invested in AM did not want FM to succeed. Everything I've
read says that Armstrongs first demo clearly demonstrated
superior performance and in spite of all efforts by RCA and
ATT, FM eventually surpassed AM in the market.

That was after the fact. Before the fact apparently it was a proven
scientific theory that FM could not be better than AM.

"Proven" by whom? Where are these proofs?

Once this theory was falsified by Armstrong's first demo,
politics and business entered in to delay its acceptance.

The the politics and economics were there from the start, and
the "technical" and "scientific" "proofs" were proffered in
solely in defense of those non=-scientific interests.

There was plenty of both evidence and technical support
for FM well before Armstrong's demonstration. Once again,
you're missing the point: the argument was NOT a technical
or scientific argument, it was an argument over competing
commercial interests, and "science" was used as a distraction.

The AM vs FM arguments are very similar to the sordid argument
a couple of decades earlier in the Edison (DC) vs Westinghouse (AC)
"debate." Edison resorted to similar bogus "scientific" arguments
against the use of AC current for power distribution, supported by
public demonstrations of the electrocution of cats and farm animals
by AC current. Edison apparently went so far as to attempt to
introduce the terms "westinghouse" in to the common lexison as
a synonym for "electrocution."

It was, in precisely the same way, the same bogus debate: using
"scientific" arguments to defend economic interests.

It's interesting to note that a century or so after the fact,
both AC and DC power distribution (long-distance transmission
is done by DC to eliminate inductive losses while local distribution
is almost entirely AC, to facilitate transformer-based power
step-up and step-down conversion).

In the same way, AM and FM are no longer competing transmission
methods: both have their strengths in one domain and weaknesses
in others. How many long-distance, clear-channel FM transmissions
are you aware of, for example? (the counter argument of the superior
fidelity of FM is largely moot, given how badly all radio transmission
is done anyway. And "high-fidelity talk radio" on FM? Really?)

It took FM some 30 years to dominate radio (mostly due to gov't regulatory
meddling).

Which, itself, is mostly dominated by commercial interests.

How long did it take digital to surpass analog in audio recordings?
Some would say digital hasn't surpassed analog.

And their "scientific" arguments include such things as "missing
stuff between the samples" and "stair steps" and the like.

My point was that Nyquist's theory is just that,

You keep saying the "Nyquist theory". There is no "Nyquist theory."

There is Nuquist's Theorem A "theory" and a "theorem" are very
different. Nyquist's theorem is a theorom as the Pythagorean
theorem is NOT a theory.

It is accepted until proven wrong. It may
never be proven wrong, but there are people who are trying.

Name any credible attempts to "prove" that Nyquist's theorem is
wrong. While you're at it, sow us similar proofs that Pythagorus's
theorem is wrong as well.

It may be absolutely correct or not, but it is not the gospel
some folks believe it to be.

No, a gospel is something someone believes because they
have faith in it. A "theorem" is not a gospel, rather it
is something that it supported by a very sound set of
mathematical concepts.

You or anyone else can choose to "believe" or not in any
theorem: denying its validity is something your get to
do at your won peril: the physical world around cares not
one wit of your's or anyone else's "belief".