Occams razor is credited to William of Ockham, a 14th-century Franciscan friar, theologian and philosopher.
In philosophical debate a razor is an abductive rule of thumb or heuristic that infers that unlikely predictions, or explanations, are to be "shaved off" on balance of probability.
It is also referred to as a law of parsimony which is a principle that says that: ‘Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.’ (In Latin, Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.)
However, it seems that William of Ockham never actually said this in any of his writings!
In plain modern english, Occams razor, or the law of parsimony, means that:
The best explanation is the one that requires you to make the fewest possible assumptions about what's involved.
There are exceptions to every rule:
Albert Einstein
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
“Everything should be made as simple as
possible, but not simpler.”
Stephen Hawking
"We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us mortals. It seems better to employ the principle known as Occam’s razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed."
Isaac Newton
"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”
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