Passage A
Passage A
The author presents and mildly critiques the ideas of Karl Popper regarding positive and negative evidence.
She starts out acknowledging the merits of his contribution. Negative evidence is definitely more powerful than positive evidence, since negative evidence has the power to prove a theory wrong, whereas positive evidence only shows that "so far, it's always been correct".
The rest of the first paragraph involves a series of attributions to Popper. Frequently, if an author is taking pains to separate someone else's ideas from her own, it's because a disagreement is around the bend. We can also see a negative attitudinal marker with the work "hyperbolic", which means exaggerating to an unrealistic degree.
Paragraph 2 delivers on our suspicions with a "However" author pivot. The second paragraph stresses that Popper goes overboard in acting like , since in the real world it's messier than that.
Testing scientific theories (to see whether we get positive or negative evidence, i.e. matching the predictions vs. not-matching the predictions) means assuming that other theories are correct, that your measuring instruments are working correctly, and potentially other assumptions.
So when negative evidence is found, it isn't immediately clear what that's telling us: it could be telling us, as Popper is thinking, that the theory we're testing is wrong but it could just be that one of our other theories is wrong, or that something went awry with the measurement.
Passage B
As we start the second passage, we're listening attentively for the first signs of Overlap. In the second sentence, we see "auxiliary assumptions" (which to me sticks out, because prior to Passage A, I had never heard the expression "auxiliary premises" before).
So we pause and possibly re-read that part of Passage A to dial in the meaning / significance of auxiliary assumptions to Passage A:
when a measurement doesn't match Theory A's predictions, - maybe Theory A is wrong - maybe an auxiliary assumption is wrong (e.g. Theory B is wrong. Idea X is wrong. Our instruments failed)
Passage B then takes us through two different examples.
Uranus Mercury
Measure U's orbit M's orbit doesn't didn't match didn't match match Newton's theory Newton's theory theory Reason for negative evidence
Aux. assump = wrong. Theory = wrong. We'd assumed there At first we thought weren't any planets aux assump of no nearby Uranus, planets near M was because we wrong, but once hadn't found Einstein's math Neptune yet worked, we found out Newt's theory was wrong.