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Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science
- Hermel 11y agoIf it is not testable, it does not sound like physics to me. Physics is an empirical science, and should therefore be testable by definition.
- taylored 11y agoIts testable just not with current tech
- Hermel 11y agoThen why ask philosophers? If you don't know what the other side of the moon looks like because rockets have not been invented yet, how could a philosopher possibly help?
- burke 11y agoMaybe not. It's not completely clear that, for example, string theory could ever be experimentally verified, since it operates completely at a level below all the manifestations of our observable universe. (AFAIK, I'm no physicist) What technology can you imagine that could ever prove or disprove a hypothesis of our universe being only one facet of a multiverse? The apparatus would necessarily exist within the closed system.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago> The apparatus would necessarily exist within the closed system. does being in a multiverse influences our world in any way using current theories? yes > we can eventually figure out and run an experiment no > then studying it is as productive as searching the Russel's teapot this is how you set apart a theory from speculation, a falsification test. i.e. > http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847
- dietrichepp 11y agoBut the multiverse theory is in competition with other theories, some of which make the same predictions. If two or five or seventeen theories all make the same predictions, do you pick one? Which one? If you want to pick the simplest theory, what criteria do you use to figure out that one theory is simpler than another theory?
- eva1984 11y agoCan you elaborate?
- Cyph0n 11y agoA large chunk of physics is theoretical in nature. Sometimes you simply cannot experimentally validate a phenomenon, so you instead propose a theory that attempts to explain it using physics. Then in the future, when the phenomenon is testable, your peers determine whether your theory was correct or not.
- XorNot 11y agoNo sometimes you can't build a practical, on-demand test. You can predict what future observations should look like.
- spooningtamarin 11y agotheory is by definition a tested hypothesis
- legulere 11y agoAtomism is a good example of how philosophy first made up a theory that was later confirmed (in a changed version). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism You could also derive the Atomic nature of matter through math though, as infinitely devisable sets end up with paradoxes that don't match up with reality (think banarch-tarski) You can do all this without an idea how to test it.
- pdkl95 11y agoGiven the knowledge available 2000+ years ago, atomism was a surprisingly good idea. Yah, they got a lot of the details wrong, but that basic idea that reality is made up of basic "building blocks" that combine into the larger structures we can observe is basically correct. The philosophers that invented atomism probably thought about how the might see their atoms directly. I wonder how many "crazy" ideas were dreamed up that sounded impossible, that are now easy experiments to do today. Theory is important, even if it sounds impossible today, because we have a history of redefining what is "possible" throughout the history of science.
- Figs 11y ago
- andreasvc 11y ago> Physics is an empirical science Theoretical physics is also very much a thing. > and should therefore be testable by definition. That sounds nice but the definition of testable is hard to pin down and changes over time.
- wtallis 11y agoWhat do you mean by "testable"? There's a pretty big spectrum of "untestable" ranging from requiring too many trillions of dollars to requiring more resources than this planet has to requiring equipment or energy levels we don't know how to produce even in theory to requiring stuff we're pretty sure is impossible like looking beyond the range of the observable universe or requiring more energy than is contained in the observable universe. And at what point in its development and study do you abandon a theory that nobody has yet invented a way to test?
- shas3 11y agoYou've actually summarized the article in your comment!
- mahranch 11y agoExcept the question remains unanswered. "Untestable" is basically a grey area. There's "untestable right this minute, but in 5, 10 or 20 years it will be testable", then there's "we can probably test it in 100 or so years..." then there's the "it would take 1,000 years or more (maybe never) to test it". Theories like String Theory tend to fall into the first, possibly dabbling with the second option. Researchers are already starting to work on ways to test string theory, with promising results. It's quite likely that within 20 years, we might be able to do just that. While things like the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or multiverse theories tend to fall on the "maybe in 1,000 years, but probably never" category. I think the real question is: How patient are we?
- guscost 11y ago> How patient are we? If you mean we're going to be hearing about the Many Mystical Worlds of Quantum Physics from Deepak Chopra types for the next 1,000 years, I'd say "not very" is a reasonable answer.
- smegel 11y ago> And at what point in its development and study do you abandon a theory that nobody has yet invented a way to test? Perhaps a better question is at what point does philosophy become physics? Finding a way to test the theory, and doing so, may be such a point.
- cwzwarich 11y agoCosmology has been an uncontroversial part of physics for quite some time now, and most of its major claims can never be tested in the same that other physical theories can be tested, barring some "creation of a universe in a lab" scenario.
- Animats 11y agoPhysics used to be "hard science" - if it wasn't testable, it wasn't meaningful. Physicists used to look down on other sciences for that reason. This article shows how much worse things have become. Nobody can figure out a way to test string theory. In cosmology, you can only observe, not experiment. As the article points out, the big questions are out of reach for scaling reasons. Trying to fix the problem through weaker definitions of "testable" is desperation. All those smart people hate to face the fact that what they're doing may be total bullshit. This has major economic consequences for physicists - why should they be funded? Physics is funded because it produced the atomic bomb and semiconductors. Those came from the testable parts of physics. Untestable physics cannot produce engineering technology. (The article says "no one has ever seen an atom". That's just wrong. There are lots of picture of atoms. Even pictures of atoms lined up to spell "IBM".[1]) [1] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/05/us/2-researchers-spell-ibm-atom-by-atom.html http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/05/us/2-researchers-spell-ibm...
- weinzierl 11y agoI fully agree with your point, but I think the "picture of atoms" is not a good supporting argument. The IBM image[1] is nothing more than a visualization of measurements including a good measure of artistic license. It has not much to do with seeing in the usual sense. [1] http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-flinte/ibm.tif http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-flinte/...
- tbabb 11y agoEvery picture is a visualization of measurements.
- gamesbrainiac 11y agoThis should be a quote.
- c22 11y ago"Every picture is a visualization of measurements."
- weinzierl 11y agoNowadays, as several philosophers at the workshop said, Popperian falsificationism has been supplanted by Bayesian confirmation theory, or Bayesianism, a modern framework based on the 18th-century probability theory of the English statistician and minister Thomas Bayes. Bayesianism allows for the fact that modern scientific theories typically make claims far beyond what can be directly observed — no one has ever seen an atom — and so today’s theories often resist a falsified-unfalsified dichotomy. Instead, trust in a theory often falls somewhere along a continuum, sliding up or down between 0 and 100 percent as new information becomes available. “The Bayesian framework is much more flexible” than Popper’s theory, said Stephan Hartmann, a Bayesian philosopher at LMU. “It also connects nicely to the psychology of reasoning.” I've never heard of Bayesianism in this context. Is this a serious approach in the philosophy of science?
- dietrichepp 11y agoYes, this is real and it can be done rigorously. The big problem is, "How do we come up with reasonable priors?" It is still a minority position.
- guscost 11y ago> The big problem is, "How do we come up with reasonable priors?" Predictably, as a hardcore supporter of Popper's version, I don't think this problem will be solved.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoEmpirical Bayes methods (in which the priors come from observed sample data) are a thing.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoYes. It's a fairly natural outgrowth of falsification based theories, and is in fact completely necessary. Consider a simple theory - bear attacks will be very low in the UK forever. Consider an alternate theory - bear attacks will be low until 2016 and then the bearpocalypse happens. Both theories have passed all attempts at falsification - they both accurately predict that bears haven't so far eaten very few people. The Bayesian approach is to assign a prior distribution to various theories of this nature. Because there are infinitely many possible priors, most exceedingly complicated (because the set of priors of complexity < C is finite or at least compact), we'll need to (eventually) assign low probabilities to high complexity ones. This gives a natural derivation of occams razor as well, at least as an asymptotic law. A very readable approach to this is a post by Scott Alexander: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/03/the-guardian-vs-induction/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/03/the-guardian-vs-inducti... Wikipedia is also pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction
- smegel 11y agoWhat was wrong with the article title? > A Fight for the Soul of Science
- function_seven 11y agoI think that title is meaningless. The one being used here on HN succinctly summarizes the article, while that one doesn't give me a clue about the subject matter
- elie_CH 11y agoSo they're doing Metaphysics. Time to (re)read Kant.
- hodwik 11y agoWe had a rush of scientific breakthroughs 100 years ago. I believe we will have more. That experimentation in physics has slowed down to 18th century levels doesn't mean science is over, it just means the low-hanging fruit is over and we will have to continue slogging through theory before we discover new experiments. Science has always relied on philosophy for its underlying direction, it's just obvious again. It took 2040 years before science/math could answer Zeno's paradoxes. If you can't handle the slog you're not really a scientist, you're a technician.
- eternalban 11y agoIf we disambiguate the factual success of applied science from the theoretical aspirations and/or formulations of the past 100 years [1], we would note the substantial downturn in the latter compared to 19th century. I further disagree regarding your take on the "underlying" basis of science. Science begs philosophy to explain its (irreducible) mathematical foundation, where the said foundation ("basis") has a few un-canny givens/axioms in its bag of tricks. Empiricism was the line drawn a few centuries ago. And just like the 'magna carta', the latter day "sages" apparently have determined the ancient ones were in error .. [post-comment-edit: 1] Roughly speaking. To set bounds, above would consider Einstien a good citizen of 19th century science.
- noobermin 11y agoNo one is arguing whether science is over, they are arguing whether modern theoretical physics is science. Another thing somewhat impacted by this issue that people don't think about is that we might not be able to keep up this pace in research for things like string theory for non-scientific reasons: specifically, science funding has flat-lined while the number of students entering the fundamental research fields is increasing. Really, particle physics is probably one of the most saturated fields in theoretical physics today. There simply isn't enough room for everyone to study what they want. Therefore, given the "zero-sum game" situation we have, we need to decide where it's beneficial to spend our tax dollars and time researching...or most likely, governments who barely understand how to balance a budget will decide it for us. Given that string theory's only argument at this point is suspect amongst a plurality of traditional scientists, it seems like low-hanging fruit to be picked off the funding tree. Regarding the "keep researching" line in higher level theory that the end of the article and you seem to be promoting...I think yes, you will always have people researching something out there, although honestly, the people who will be able to will most likely be at a certain number of institutions which can be enumerated on one or two hands. The rest of theoretical particle physics? I guess the sustainability of that program is dependent on the stress tolerance of physics graduate students and post-docs for the time going forward. The other way out is to, you guessed it, work in research that is testable, and leads to fancy toys the beltway boys can appreciate.
- mannykannot 11y ago"Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, pointed out that falsifiability is woefully inadequate as a separator of science and nonscience, as Popper himself recognized. Astrology, for instance, is falsifiable — indeed, it has been falsified ad nauseam — and yet it isn’t science." You could say the same for phlogiston or N-rays. Falsifiable hypotheses that actually get falsified are dropped from science, but the process of falsifying them is a scientific activity.
- qb45 11y agoJust shows how sad academia is. Wouldn't be the first time I'm seeing those guys ponder endlessly on something other people say or do without bothering to really understand what those others are thinking and trying to achieve. BTW, is astrology actually falsifiable? I'm under impression that astrologists deliberately strive for unfalsifiability exactly to avoid falsification which could cast doubt on their wisdom.
- wolfgke 11y ago> BTW, is astrology actually falsifiable? I'm under impression that astrologists deliberately strive for unfalsifiability exactly to avoid falsification which could cast doubt on their wisdom. It is. Just do the following experiment: Find, say, ten persons and an (or many) astrologists and let them create a horoscope (say, either a prognosis for the future or description of character traits) for these 10 persons, where only the exact time and location of birth is given to the astrologists. After that give all ten horoscopes to all ten persons and let them rank. Now just formulate some sensible statistical model and voila - falsified.
- tokenadult 11y agoHave you heard about the Forer Effect? Horoscopes are written to be convincing to gullible readers. http://skepdic.com/forer.html http://skepdic.com/forer.html
- 11y ago
- basicplus2 11y agoand in between is quantum physics which is great for predicting outcomes but cannot be proven that it accurately describes reality
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoWhat does "cannot be proven that it accurately describes reality" even mean, because I'm not seeing the sense in it.
- dinkumthinkum 11y agoWell, science cannot be "proven" to "accurately describe reality."
- dmfdmf 11y agoThis crisis in Physics makes me happier than anyone can know. It signals the end of the dominance of Kantian philosophy in Physics. Mach's principle (Einstein's polestar), Popperian falsifiability, Cantor's paradise of infinity (as described by Hilbert) and all other derivatives of Kant are the dead-end of a false metaphysics and epistemology. We do indeed, live in interesting (or depending on your worldview, dangerous) times.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoWhat does physics have to do with Cantor.
- dmfdmf 11y agoTo get to Cantor's theories you have to accept his concept of a "completed infinity". This implies that infinity is a metaphysical concept, i.e. that infinity really exists in the universe. For example, do you believe that black holes are really infinite density or does an infinite property indicate a breakdown in the equations or theory, i.e. infinity is an epistemological concept. Modern physics is not consistent on this question but the error and question all derive from Kant.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago> i.e. that infinity really exists in the universe. I don't see why this has to follow.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- throwaway999888 11y agoWhat's the (an) alternative?
- dmfdmf 11y ago
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoA mistake that lots of people, including many in this thread, is to conflate 'physics' and 'fundamental/particle physics.' The former's still chugging along pretty good, with things like the "invisibility cloaking" and all sorts of condensed matter stuff.
- soheil 11y ago"Astrology, for instance, is falsifiable — indeed, it has been falsified ad nauseam — and yet it isn’t science." -Pigliucci Mind blown! Wat? If it's falsified then it's just wrong, i.e. it had the potential to be science before it was proven to be wrong and now it isn't. He seems to be confused about the chronology of theories. If I make up a theory based on complete bs and it just happens to be falsifiable and then falsified then I wasn't doing science. I don't know of any falsifiable theory that was just pulled out of a hat, was recognized as one but wasn't immediately falsified (if there is one then he has a point.) If I come up with a theory and work hard to make sure it's falsifiable then I was doing science even if the theory was later falsified.
- xamuel 11y agoI'd actually argue against astrology being falsifiable. It mostly consists of making generic "predictions" that could apply to anyone, it's the very definition of unfalsifiability. It would be falsifiable if it made predictions like "soheil will spend exactly 35 minutes on Hacker News today", but it doesn't, instead it makes predictions like "You have a deeper side to you that people don't know about", total bs but not really "false".
- soheil 11y agoI also agree, as a whole, Astrology isn't falsifiable. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.
- choosername 11y agoI'd argue that it's purer than most because measurements interfer less with the measurenent space. The equipment and local setup are at odds, though.
- return0 11y agoA single instance of false prediction is enough to falsify a theory. As such , the methodology of observing stars to predict the future has been falsified millions of times, hence the only thing that is left is to make vague, unfalsifiable predictions now. In either case, it's not popper-scientific.
- dinkumthinkum 11y agoThe premise here is pretty weird. There is a whole branch called philosophy of science. You can't just say something that is wrong or untestable is by default is philosophy. Also, physicist have proposed some experiments and observation such as regarding the cosmic microwave background radiation. There is a book called "The Trouble with Physics" and many articles on the subject. There is something to be said about many claims in theoretical physics and the lack of testability but I think this is not rigorous enough and too loose with the labeling.
- andy_ppp 11y agoI often think about theoretical physics without really knowing enough about it. For example, dark matter, as far as I can tell, is invented to make gravity match how our universe behaves (there appears to be lots more mass than we are expecting). And I also hear that no one understands how shortly after the big bang why our universe (a tiny ball of energy) was quite so uniform. My theory instead of dark matter and string theory (mine is probably wrong) is that the universe consists of every single quantum event that ever happened or could happen and that gravity operates as a blurred field operating through many of these close quantum "universes". The reason could then be that the set of events that happened after the big bang, every quantum state was explored and we are living in one of the universes that happened to be smooth. It should also explain why gravity is so "weak" compared to the other forces. Anyway, I'm sure people smarter than me have thought of this and dismissed it for whatever reason!
- cabinpark 11y agoI think high level theory is wandering aimlessly through a field blindfolded with little guidance or where to look. This is because our current theories are so good, we have no idea where to look. So it begins conjecturing and conjecturing. What it ends up with is nonsensical garbage that does little to advance physics. But yet, there isn't a crisis in physics at all since these theorists are so far removed from reality, I don't really care what they think. They don't really tell use anything useful or interesting so I tend to ignore them. Instead, I focus on things we do know exist but cannot explain, say astrophysical jets, pulsars, or supernovas. We know they exist and we can see them, yet we understand them very little. We have models that are getting better and better over time, but they all exist within the current understanding of physics. This is where physics really is. Whatever garbage the theorists put up on the arxiv can be ignored with little loss. Instead, those of us "in the trenches" can continue our work trying to explain observed phenomena with our current theories. There is no need to add in extra dimensions or cohomology. Maybe, when we've done really understanding our current theories can we talk to those theorists again. Incidentally, since I started my PhD in physics doing numerical relativity, my views on science have changed completely. I used to be interested in stuff like string theory, but actually sitting down and trying to do it left me feeling empty inside. Now that I work in an area that is very closely related to observations, I feel like I am actually learning something about the universe. It's hard to explain philosophically, but I really believe in experiments as the guiding principle of science. In my case, we see pulsars (2500+ of them) and we have yet to provide a full explanation of their nature. To me there is something more real and scientific about this then trying to explain multiverse theory but I don't know the words to describe it.
- purpled_haze 11y ago> But yet, there isn't a crisis in physics at all since these theorists are so far removed from reality, I don't really care what they think. They don't really tell use anything useful or interesting so I tend to ignore them. Einstein was a theoretical physicist. Without his theories: * Japan might not have been defeated in WWII. * There might be more coal power plants, because there would be no nuclear power plants. * GPS probably would never have worked. * We'd have fewer successful space missions. * There would be no superconductive magnets. * There would be no digital cameras or solar cells. * There would be no lasers. I could keep going if you want... References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity http://www.guidetothecosmos.com/present_wwe.html http://www.guidetothecosmos.com/present_wwe.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission
- jordanpg 11y ago> But this zooming in demands evermore energy, and the difficulty and cost of building new machines increases exponentially relative to the energy requirement, Gross said. Part of the problem is, as Gross points out, that the cost of experimental research at extreme scales is far out of sync with the cost of theoretical research. The cost of the LHC and the annual budget of NASA are, for example, are around O($10B). Compared with the value of the US economy (just for comparison), which is O($10000B) or so, this doesn't seem all that high. Of course the problem is that no direct economic output stems from constructing machines for experimental research. In addition to cost, there are the problems of time (how long experimental work takes) and engineering manpower that might be better spent elsewhere. In any case, it doesn't seem obvious to me that in a different economic context than the one we live in, which is largely focused on wasteful consumption and war, that far, far more money couldn't be devoted to experimental research.
- Htsthbjig 11y agoScience is born the day that Socrates says ""I know that I know nothing". Science dies the moment things that are untestable becomes "a new kind of evidence". If we can't test something because whatever reason, like we don't have enough energy, the fact that we know we can't test it is in fact valuable. We will have to find methods or ways to get there in the future. Until that , we can't be sure. Fine. We know we don't know. But falsifying this fact and believing in evidence that does not exist is believing we know things that are unknown to us. This is dogma, religion, philosophy, but not science. Nothing wrong about religion, or philosophy, but it is not science.
- dil8 11y agoIntersting read on Bayesian Epistemology http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/
- ianamartin 11y agoOne of the things that has struck me for a long time about social sciences (and sciences where, in general, the evidence is based on stochastic processes) is that the underlying philosophy of logic is modern symbolic (aka Boolean). The biggest problem there is that hypotheses have no underlying mechanism to make sure that the potential cause and effect are semantically related. If p then q seems innocent enough. It probably seems even more innocent (or at least more simple) than All men are mortal Socrates is a man Socrates is therefore a mortal. Because the required relationships in a syllogistic model can become a bit complicated. I started off in this realm as a Philosophy major studying mostly Aristotelian models of deductive reasoning. It was mostly for kicks because I was a violinist at the time and needed a break from my music theory courses. But when I got into the market research industry and started writing statistical software, I found serious problems with assumptions everywhere I looked. It seemed to me that there's a real problem with the way people with informal or introductory experience dealt with statistical results, with the relationship between null and alternative hypotheses, and with the evidence generated by sampling processes. This is probably largely irrelevant to high-level Physicists, but I think it's at least partly relevant when we talk about what is and isn't falsifiable. There's a comment in the piece where a guy says that Astrology is falsifiable, so we know that shouldn't be the only criteria for something to count as Science. I think he's on to something there because I think the fundamental hypothesis of Astrology is so far out of whack that it shouldn't have been considered. There's nothing behind astrology that's any better than a bad if p then q statement. But we have no way of evaluating these by form. One can simple say, "If the grass is green, then the moon is made of blue cheese." This is formally a valid statement. The problem I encounter many times (anecdotally, of course) is that people don't treat this statement as a material implication. They treat it as a logical conjunct. So that seems somewhat safe in the grass/moon example. They make the mistake of thinking of it as simply as, "If the grass is green AND the moon is made of blue cheese . . ." Well, that's clearly false. So why bother? But a material implication has consequences. You can flip it around and say (by axiom) that if p then q then !q implies !p. I can assert that green grass => blue cheese moon. And if you accept that as valid, you can likewise assert that !blue cheese moon => !green grass. It's easy to see the flaws in this contrived example, but it's often very difficult to see these problems in realistic examples when you are looking at effect sizes in medicine, or changes in advertising techniques, or samples from thermometers, or the kinds of things that I have no knowledge of in theoretical Physics. It's often very difficult to assess when a scientific study has any realistic relationship between a null and alternative hypothesis. It would be nice if it were all statistically about whether or not these two numbers are the same or different, but that's frequently not the case. I think the idea is correct, that we do need Philosophers to come up with a better system. Even something as simple as "The subject of a material implication must be included in the predicate of the material implication." might be a good start. Although it's woefully naive. It would be kind of interesting to see people testing hypothesis in the scientific world that were formulated as syllogisms. i.e., based on studies x, y, and z we can make the following claims: all (or some--doesn't matter. Most "some" claims can be reduced to a subset of "all" claims) x are y This study shows that z is x Therefore z is y Is it limiting and problematic? Of course. Where do new categories happen? Well, there are negations. You can prove that phenomenon z is not a member of previously known phenomena and is therefore something else. While I think a great many of people sort of feel this way about stuff, I think there's a reason to codify it formally. Because so many people don't think very clearly about these things in aggregate. It seems kind of ugly. But it would be an improvement over what we have now, which is basically a free-for-all in certain realms of science, where any sufficiently complex idea is grounds for further research, even when the possibilities of proof are non-existent. I say that more to the social sciences than I do the theoretical physicists of the world, so perhaps I'm off point here. But my general idea is that, yes, philosophy can and should step it up a bit.
- dschiptsov 11y agoProbably, "we" should take a reductionist approach and stop piling up nonsense upon nonsense, mis-using math, statistics, probability and publishing more compilations of unjustifiable and unverifiable references to another products of unconstrained imagination, ambitions and self-praise. Ironically, since Upanishads, there is a maxim, popularized by Buddha, that we should strive to "see things as they are" instead of worship nonsense produced by society of mediocrity. No better advice, probably, could be given. We are in the situation quite similar to that one of 6th-7th century AD, where almost every person who could barely write produce volumes of "religious" and "philosophical" doctrines, commentaries, commentaries to commentaries and similar crap (so called Tantric Buddhism texts, which are available in museums). Nowadays, people who were barely graduated and had, lets say, not quite developed, highly constrained, too specialized and excessively brainwashed minds are doing "research", that egotistic pompous meme-joggling we could read in any so-called academic journals. So, let's try to see things as they are, not misuse math to produce modern hymeras and mumbo-jumbos.
- samuell 11y ago> "The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method." Well, there are other areas of Science that have similar or even worse problems with speculative nature and departure from the scientific method. Read "Goo-to-you evolution". Not much "repeatable, observable experimentation" there. If only Biologists were as honest and honed in consistent, rational and logical thinking as physicists. I'm prone to think the historically more mathematical nature of the physics discipline plays a role here.
- daxfohl 11y agoMy take on the rationales given in the article. #1: "Only game in town": ZERO viability (perhaps negative). Ether was the only game in town before relativity. Geocentricism was the only game in town before it wasn't. Gods were the only game in town before science. #2: "Y grew out of X (and X is solid)": ZERO viability (perhaps negative). It's essentially a corollary of the exact same rationale. (e.g. X = Maxwell's Equations, and Y = Ether). Everyone is thinking along the lines of X, and the only thing they can come up with is Y. #3: "Unexpectedly delivered explanations": THIS is a big deal. Or at least it may be. This is what (I hate to say "philosophers of science", depicting "armchair philosophers", but rather "scientists of science") need to be focusing on. In essence, it asks: can mathematics (sometimes) be considered an experimental science, in the Popperian sense? I think it could, if formalized, and would allow us to tackle on some of these nasty questions more definitively, but I have no idea what that formalization would be. However I'd be very interested to see if etherian theory had any "unexpectedly delivered explanations" before Einstein. THAT is worth investigating.