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Chemistry

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  • $\begingroup$ I'd remark that “educated guess” makes it sound worse than it perhaps is. Lots of good science relies on similar methods. The important thing is that the proxy's validity can be experimentally verified independently of the result the proxy is used to obtain. In this case, the problem seems to be not that proxies are involved but that that the error bars on the final result are huge – but as long as they're known, those results can still be useful. $\endgroup$
    – leftaroundabout
    Commented Apr 12, 2020 at 20:39
  • $\begingroup$ Right, Feynman was famous for making good educated guesses in physics. I agree that educated guesses are good and even necessary for doing science but in analytical chemistry the typically "permitted" error is less than 5%. When we develop new chemical analysis methods, we would like to have the error as low as possible. It is just a narrow perspective of analytical chemistry where guesses are not very welcome. $\endgroup$
    – ACR
    Commented Apr 12, 2020 at 22:06
  • $\begingroup$ Yeah. In physics there are some methods with error 0.000001% and some methods with error 70% or so... $\endgroup$
    – leftaroundabout
    Commented Apr 13, 2020 at 8:53