Today

Distinguish the three classical paths to adopting an idea: authority, induction, and conjecture.

Recognise that evidence selects between conjectures rather than generating them.

Apply Deutsch's hard-to-vary criterion to tell good explanations from bad ones.

Spot the four classic failure modes: post-hoc, narrow, vague, and empirically equivalent.

Reject the demand to 'justify' knowledge; accept that all theories are tentative and open to criticism.

Run the Popperian engine: bold conjecture → severe test → improvement, in a small case.

Use methodological, ethical, and aesthetic criticism as three independent severity tests.

Given a real-world claim, run the full hard-to-vary + criticism workflow and rate it.

State what 'local' means in physics and why classical physics is local by construction.

Reconstruct Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen's argument that quantum mechanics is incomplete.

Walk through the inequality, what experiments measure, and which assumption gives way.

Read the equation as a deterministic linear law on a wave function in Hilbert space.

Take the wave function literally; understand why this preserves locality and determinism.

Re-express physics in terms of which transformations can and cannot be performed on substrates.

Use the possible/impossible dichotomy as a more fundamental ground than initial-conditions+laws.

Derive the second law of thermodynamics as a fact about which tasks are reversible.

See information as physical-but-substrate-independent; explain why digital computation works.

Treat economic value as ordinal preference revealed by chosen action under scarcity.

Read every choice as a trade-off across a margin; price as information about scarcity.

Trace why a civilisation's growth tracks its tolerance for criticism and good explanations.

Apply Popperian rationality to a business decision: bold conjecture, severe test, fast revision.

Integration test across all four phases: read a claim and judge it on every dimension.