 Yet Lakatos flatly denies that there are critical tests, in the Popperian sense, in science, and argues the point convincingly by turning the above example of an alleged critical test on its head. What, he asks, would have happened if Galle had not found the planet Neptune? Would Newtonian physics have been abandoned, or would Newton’s theory have been falsified? The answer is clearly not, for Galle’s failure could have been attributed to any number of causes other than the falsity of Newtonian physics (e.g., the interference of the earth’s atmosphere with the telescope, the existence of an asteroid belt which hides the new planet from the earth, etc). The suggestion is that the “falsification/corroboration” disjunction offered by Popper is unjustifiable binary: non-corroboration is not necessarily falsification, and falsification of a high-level scientific theory is never brought about by an isolated observation or set of observations. Such theories are, it is now widely accepted, highly resistant to falsification; they are “tenaciously protected from refutation by a vast ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses” (Lakatos 1978: 4) and so are falsified, if at all, not by Popperian critical tests, but rather within the elaborate context of the research programmes associated with them gradually grinding to a halt. Popper’s distinction between the logic of falsifiability and its applied methodology does not in the end do full justice to the fact that all high-level theories grow and live despite the existence of anomalies (i.e., events/phenomena which are incompatible with them). These, Lakatos suggests, are not usually taken by the working scientist as an indication that the theory in question is false. On the contrary, in the context of a progressive research programme he or she will necessarily assume that the auxiliary hypotheses which are associated with the theory can in time be modified to incorporate, and thereby explain, recalcitrant phenomena.