9 ms·

There Is No Distinctly Scientific Method

35 points by sonabinu 10y ago

adrianratnapala 10y ago
I am in guarded agreement with the article. The most distinctive thing I can come up with about science is the habit of rigorously asking "what do you know and how do you know it" -- but that is (a) not all that distinct from what rational non-scientists do, and (b) not a particular method. And yet -- I get queasy when I hear philosphers talking about (for example) Aristotle's "science". The idea being seeminlgy that anything he said about plants or falling bodies or other such subject matter is science. Now Aristotle was an observant, rational fellow -- and yet his results in these fields don't feel all that scientific to me. I don't know what I missing.
- pjlegato 10y ago
  The distinctive thing about science is rather that you must answer the question "what do you know and how do you know it" with evidence, derived from repeatable experiments. Other modes of thinking do not have this requirement, and often rely upon nothing more than "it seems to me..." to answer those questions.
  - tnecniv 10y ago
    Right, but that applies to other fields as well. You might not be able to do repeatable experiments as a historian, but if you don't back your argument with factual evidence from a variety of sources, you will get laughed out of the room.
  - pjscott 10y ago
    Repeatable? Sorry in advance for quibbling, but -- suppose that a star goes nova, and you weren't expecting it, but you happen to have telescopes gathering interesting data from this once-in-a-stellar-lifetime event. If you learn interesting things from it, is that science? I'd say yes, but this isn't repeatable. It's also not really an experiment. It's wonderful evidence, though, really priceless stuff that you couldn't get any other way. What is the essence of science? I'm not convinced that it involves repeatability or experimentation in any really fundamental way.
    - vacri 10y ago
      It's science, but not scientific method. The two are related but different. It's an observation that is rigorously recorded, but not an experiment. Science is full of this stuff - look at the field of taxonomy, for example. The idea that only those concepts which have been experimentally tested against the null hypothesis can be labelled 'science' goes against both reason and the spirit of the term.
    - Avshalom 10y ago
      Yeah I've opined about this a couple times here. But yeah I don't like "experiments" either. I like data, I like observation; experiments are just a way to control the rate we gather those observations, gather that data, instead of (and I did astronomy as an undergrad so I am particularly sympathetic to this field of examples) hoping a star explodes while you're looking at it. Gamma Ray Bursts are a great example of things we spent decades pretty much just hoping we'd be looking at when they happened. And there's weird one offs that we're basically just guessing on. But we build better instruments and make better observations and gather more data.
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      Yes, repeatable. The specific event of that nova will not be repeated, of course, but the interesting observations, when compared with existing theory, will suggest repeatable experiments. And that's where the science really gets done. Not in the initial observation, but in the controlled experiments that follow, in which individual hypotheses can be tested. Experiments do not need to be run in a lab, BTW. As long as the variables are accounted for, natural observations are just as valid as those that are synthesized in a lab. One of the most famous "experiments" in physics history was the observation of gravity-deflected star images during an eclipse, which helped support Einstein's general theory of relativity.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    > derived from repeatable experiments. And this is why astronomy, geology, and paleontology are not sciences, and it's not looking too good for climatology or oceanography or meteorology.
- woodandsteel 10y ago
  Aristotle's biology and political science were quite empirical, and are the foundations of the more modern versions. His cosmology was off track because he didn't have the instruments, like the telescope, needed to collect the needed data. His physics was sound for the particular phenomena he was trying to explain, as this article explains: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4057v2.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4057v2.pdf
vmorgulis 10y ago
There is the Occam's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
ysleepy 10y ago
He lacks basic understanding of science. He repeatedly uses the phrase "scientific method" and proclaims its pretty much what you instictively would do, even in many other areas, like writing poems (??!?). The Demarcation Problem (What is scientific) and Falsifiability. The english Wikipedia Article is sadly rather poor on the Demarcation Problem. - Karl Popper - Logik der Forschung (Das Abgrenzungsproblem) has the good stuff. The author compares any kind of investigation and iterative refinement with science, but does not understand the effects this method has in combination with a specific subset of "sentences" - Those which can be disproven by empiric observations. A rather trashy article. Especially the third-to-last paragraph: "If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking." That awefully sounds like, "Ah, science, its just like opinion".
- rbancroft 10y ago
  I agree that it's not a great article, perhaps typical of philosophical writings, which I have always struggled with. It's hard to digest, I read it about 4 times. But the author is a philosopher of science, I am pretty sure he has heard of Popper. I think he is trying to write it in a simple style for mass consumption, but as a result the examples seem shoe-horned in to fit his thesis.
rbancroft 10y ago
The tl;dr as far as I can tell is: scientific reasoning is a subset of reasoning, and not necessarily superior to other forms of reasoning. I can agree with that. There is a need for philosophy and purely theoretical pursuits, we can't predict what will come out of them. But at the same time, the world of science is where I want to make my bed. As the probability of a scientific "endgame" for a particular philosophical idea decreases, so does the probability of it's usefulness, or something like that. Philosophy can be one engine of creativity, but science will best determine what ideas should survive.
dahart 10y ago
My impulse is to jump in and critique, but after reading this twice, I'm actually not sure I understand what he's saying. Is it a good point? He doesn't really make any reference to the commonly understood definition of the scientific method, which AFAIK, is: hypothesize, test, repeat. And the real takeaway is: TEST. The point of the scientific method is to validate assumptions, plain and simple, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:The_Scientific_Method_as_an_Ongoing_Process.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:... > "If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking." I feel like this is the crux - the scientific method is not about quantified precision as a goal, right? Measurement is a means to an end - we measure are part of testing to actually complete the process of validating the hypothesis. If that's what "highly quantified variables" means, then maybe there's an interesting point here. But measurement was never the goal, testing is the goal. It's not really about superior thinking either. The superior thinking, in fact, is in not thinking about it, but proving it instead. It's more reliable for one simple reason: hypotheses are not accepted until tested.
- jballanc 10y ago
  There's more to it than just testing. If there weren't, then I'd be inclined to agree with the author. What many people fail to realize is that the full form of the scientific method (when applied properly) is: * make an observation * form a hypothesis that explains the observation * design a test to disprove the hypothesis * carry out the test and collect data * analyze the results and either reject the hypothesis or formulate a new test It is the necessity of a hypothesis to be falsifiable, and the intent of the scientist to disprove (not prove) their hypothesis that sets science apart.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    Why then the seeming reluctance (as posted here recently) of journals to publish "failure to replicate" papers?
lisper 10y ago
The author of this article is profoundly ignorant. There is a scientific method. Exactly how and why it works are both very well understood. The correct answer was worked out by Karl Popper and popularized by David Deutsch. Writing about the scientific method without mentioning Popper is like writing about physics without mentioning Einstein. > James Blachowicz is a professor emeritus of philosophy Why am I not surprised.
- jonsterling 10y ago
  Oh yes, rando on Hacker News is far more educated about philosophy of science than an actual philosopher! Surely he knows about Popper (duh!).
  - psyc 10y ago
    You may or may not be "right" in this particular case, but in general it's stupid to assume philosophers in the HN audience won't be drawn out to comment on such an article.
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      I have a degree in philosophy and did quite a bit of my work in philosophy of science. I feel qualified to smugly dismiss lisper's comment as an example of the well-known phenomenon of tech people on HN assuming that mastery and understanding in one field translates to mastery and understanding in all fields, sight unseen. For example, defining just what is and is not "science" or "the scientific method" is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries. But this thread is full of HN randos basically chiming in with "here's my grade-school textbook's definition, guess we don't need all those so-called experts, lol". The level of not just ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, HN users routinely display in this kind of conversation is frankly staggering.
      - mirimir 10y ago
        So why didn't the author even mention falsification?
woodandsteel 10y ago
It is true, everything that scientists do is an extension and refinement of ways of getting at the truth found in ordinary living and various other fields of expert study. The main difference is that modern science systematically excludes supernatural explanations. Much of modern philosophy of science affirms this, such as Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. People want to dispute this basically because they are implicitly subscribing to the philosophical belief that what we ordinarily experience is simply mistaken, and the really real is radically different. This belief is common to metaphysical idealism (such as Platonism) and absolute mysticism, and also materialism, cartesian dualism, and classic analytic philosophy. Other philosophies, such as phenomenology, pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein, ground our knowledge of reality in our ordinary experience, instead of trying to escape into a radically different realm. A key issue at stake here is finitude. In the realm of ordinary experience, we experience we are limited in many ways, and this means we cannot escape suffering. The various anti-experiential philosophies generally believe that their alleged really real realms are such that we can escape such suffering.
coliveira 10y ago
The author demonstrates that he doesn't know what science is. There is much more than correct reasoning necessary to do science. For example, philosophers spent thousands of years pondering ideas in topics such as gravity and chemistry, without getting much ahead. And this is possible because there is a practically infinite number of ways in which the world could be explained using logic, but these explanations cannot be ruled in as true until you perform at least some experimentation. What makes science different is that it requires observation of the world and testing of hypothesis about the observed behavior. Without a rigorous process to do these things there is no science, only philosophical speculation.
powera 10y ago
This is clearly a piece targeted at a lay audience. It says basically nothing interesting about the scientific method or science, but a lot about the nature of defining words. It's basically word salad with a click-bait headline (thankfully fixed here).
jbandela1 10y ago
For myself, I think a good way to think of science is to consider the universe as a program, and that scientists are doing black box reverse engineering. We attempt to reverse engineer the mathematical logic of the universe based on observations, and once we think we have the mathematical "source code", we do experiments which compare the outputs of the source code (our mathematical models) with the outputs of the universe given the same set of inputs. There is even the analog of refactoring where a better overall "architecture" can dramatically simplify the "source code". An example would be the move from Ptolemy and epicycles to the heliocentric view of Copernicus and Kepler that greatly simplifies the "code" for planetary motions. In addition, just like when you test a function, extreme inputs can reveal bugs. Relativity and quantum mechanics came about in this manner. We had the Newtonion "source code" and it seemed to work very well in that the output of our source code matched the output of the universe for all values that we were able to supply as input. Then it became possible to measure the universe's outputs for velocities near the speed of light and masses that were subatomic. We then realized that our reverse engineered "source code" and the universe gave divergent answers. Based on this, Einstein rewrote the reverse engineered source code in such a way that it was both very elegant and matched the universe for velocities near the speed of light while still passing all the Newtonian unit tests. Bohr et al, wrote code, that matched the universe's output when feeling with subatomic particles. Unfortunately, while both the Einstein's code and Bohr's code both give correct answers, there is a giant if statement that governs whether we call Einstein or Bohr. Having that giant if statement and separate Einstein and Bohr functions is seen as not elegant and scientists have been trying to write a single function that gets rid of the if statement and still passes the Einstein and Bohr unit tests. This is called "grand unification". This model, at least for software people like me makes a lot of sense. For example, just like a unit test that fails gives you far more information than one that passes, so an experiment that diverges from the expected value of our current "source code" can tell us in which way our source code needs to be refined.
ajarmst 10y ago
Ignoring a huge body of scholarship (cf. Popper, Feyerabend, Kuhn) as well as a great deal of recent upheaval and critique on how properly to use 'science' to approach knowledge of real truth in favour of a facile, nay vacuous, and self-serving definition of the 'scientific method' just so you can claim it's nothing special is probably not in any way helpful. But apparently it will get you published in the New York Times.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  That's not what it is saying. It's saying that if the same tools can inform poetry then they aren't limited to being "scientific" methods.
  - ajarmst 10y ago
    Wow. How did we poor benighted fools manage to stumble along without benefit of that penetrating insight?
    - dang 10y ago
      Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
      - ajarmst 10y ago
        Fair point. How about we replace it with "the scientific method has always been about finding the best way to approach the real truth about a subject of enquiry, and to further refine that approach through further study. The object is, and always was, about truth. Of course it can be applied to poetry, insofar as there can be a 'truth' about poetry. The author's point is vacuous, because he presumes to resolve a conflict he himself invented or imagined."
- ajarmst 10y ago
  On reread, I give him too much credit. As he manages to misrepresent Science, Kepler and Socrates (hint: Plato's teacher was less interested in rigourously defining words than in establishing a foundation for an entire political philosophy when he says things like 'What is Justice?') in only a few hundred words, I'm going to assume this is some sort of farce that I just don't get.
alayne 10y ago
James Blachowicz, professor emeritus of philosophy with a focus on the philosophy of science according to his Loyola page wrote "Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry". I found 51 references to Popper searching the book on Amazon. I'm not a philosophy expert, but based on this article and wikipedia information about Popper and falsifiability, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest this guy actually knows what he's talking about and perhaps some of the commenters here aren't up to date on the science of philosophy issues he is addressing.
- twblalock 10y ago
  It's amazing how many people here think that philosophy of science ended with Karl Popper.
  - cassowary 10y ago
    Karl Popper or Carl Sagan? I actually don't know the latter's views very well, but I very much get the impression that he popularised a Popperian view of science in a way that Saganites simply can't get past. A lot of people who think themself scientific and modern independent thinkers simply regurgitate what they learnt from scientific and modern independent thinkers.
return0 10y ago
He 's talking about scientific reasoning, not the scientific method. Empiricism is distinctly scientific.

35 points by sonabinu 10y ago

I am in guarded agreement with the article. The most distinctive thing I can come up with about science is the habit of rigorously asking "what do you know and how do you know it" -- but that is (a) not all that distinct from what rational non-scientists do, and (b) not a particular method. And yet -- I get queasy when I hear philosphers talking about (for example) Aristotle's "science". The idea being seeminlgy that anything he said about plants or falling bodies or other such subject matter is science. Now Aristotle was an observant, rational fellow -- and yet his results in these fields don't feel all that scientific to me. I don't know what I missing.

pjlegato 10y ago
The distinctive thing about science is rather that you must answer the question "what do you know and how do you know it" with evidence, derived from repeatable experiments. Other modes of thinking do not have this requirement, and often rely upon nothing more than "it seems to me..." to answer those questions.
- tnecniv 10y ago
  Right, but that applies to other fields as well. You might not be able to do repeatable experiments as a historian, but if you don't back your argument with factual evidence from a variety of sources, you will get laughed out of the room.
- pjscott 10y ago
  Repeatable? Sorry in advance for quibbling, but -- suppose that a star goes nova, and you weren't expecting it, but you happen to have telescopes gathering interesting data from this once-in-a-stellar-lifetime event. If you learn interesting things from it, is that science? I'd say yes, but this isn't repeatable. It's also not really an experiment. It's wonderful evidence, though, really priceless stuff that you couldn't get any other way. What is the essence of science? I'm not convinced that it involves repeatability or experimentation in any really fundamental way.
  - vacri 10y ago
    It's science, but not scientific method. The two are related but different. It's an observation that is rigorously recorded, but not an experiment. Science is full of this stuff - look at the field of taxonomy, for example. The idea that only those concepts which have been experimentally tested against the null hypothesis can be labelled 'science' goes against both reason and the spirit of the term.
  - Avshalom 10y ago
    Yeah I've opined about this a couple times here. But yeah I don't like "experiments" either. I like data, I like observation; experiments are just a way to control the rate we gather those observations, gather that data, instead of (and I did astronomy as an undergrad so I am particularly sympathetic to this field of examples) hoping a star explodes while you're looking at it. Gamma Ray Bursts are a great example of things we spent decades pretty much just hoping we'd be looking at when they happened. And there's weird one offs that we're basically just guessing on. But we build better instruments and make better observations and gather more data.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    Yes, repeatable. The specific event of that nova will not be repeated, of course, but the interesting observations, when compared with existing theory, will suggest repeatable experiments. And that's where the science really gets done. Not in the initial observation, but in the controlled experiments that follow, in which individual hypotheses can be tested. Experiments do not need to be run in a lab, BTW. As long as the variables are accounted for, natural observations are just as valid as those that are synthesized in a lab. One of the most famous "experiments" in physics history was the observation of gravity-deflected star images during an eclipse, which helped support Einstein's general theory of relativity.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  > derived from repeatable experiments. And this is why astronomy, geology, and paleontology are not sciences, and it's not looking too good for climatology or oceanography or meteorology.
woodandsteel 10y ago
Aristotle's biology and political science were quite empirical, and are the foundations of the more modern versions. His cosmology was off track because he didn't have the instruments, like the telescope, needed to collect the needed data. His physics was sound for the particular phenomena he was trying to explain, as this article explains: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4057v2.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4057v2.pdf

vmorgulis 10y ago

There is the Occam's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

ysleepy 10y ago

He lacks basic understanding of science. He repeatedly uses the phrase "scientific method" and proclaims its pretty much what you instictively would do, even in many other areas, like writing poems (??!?). The Demarcation Problem (What is scientific) and Falsifiability. The english Wikipedia Article is sadly rather poor on the Demarcation Problem. - Karl Popper - Logik der Forschung (Das Abgrenzungsproblem) has the good stuff. The author compares any kind of investigation and iterative refinement with science, but does not understand the effects this method has in combination with a specific subset of "sentences" - Those which can be disproven by empiric observations. A rather trashy article. Especially the third-to-last paragraph: "If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking." That awefully sounds like, "Ah, science, its just like opinion".

rbancroft 10y ago
I agree that it's not a great article, perhaps typical of philosophical writings, which I have always struggled with. It's hard to digest, I read it about 4 times. But the author is a philosopher of science, I am pretty sure he has heard of Popper. I think he is trying to write it in a simple style for mass consumption, but as a result the examples seem shoe-horned in to fit his thesis.

rbancroft 10y ago

The tl;dr as far as I can tell is: scientific reasoning is a subset of reasoning, and not necessarily superior to other forms of reasoning. I can agree with that. There is a need for philosophy and purely theoretical pursuits, we can't predict what will come out of them. But at the same time, the world of science is where I want to make my bed. As the probability of a scientific "endgame" for a particular philosophical idea decreases, so does the probability of it's usefulness, or something like that. Philosophy can be one engine of creativity, but science will best determine what ideas should survive.

dahart 10y ago

My impulse is to jump in and critique, but after reading this twice, I'm actually not sure I understand what he's saying. Is it a good point? He doesn't really make any reference to the commonly understood definition of the scientific method, which AFAIK, is: hypothesize, test, repeat. And the real takeaway is: TEST. The point of the scientific method is to validate assumptions, plain and simple, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:The_Scientific_Method_as_an_Ongoing_Process.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:... > "If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking." I feel like this is the crux - the scientific method is not about quantified precision as a goal, right? Measurement is a means to an end - we measure are part of testing to actually complete the process of validating the hypothesis. If that's what "highly quantified variables" means, then maybe there's an interesting point here. But measurement was never the goal, testing is the goal. It's not really about superior thinking either. The superior thinking, in fact, is in not thinking about it, but proving it instead. It's more reliable for one simple reason: hypotheses are not accepted until tested.

jballanc 10y ago
There's more to it than just testing. If there weren't, then I'd be inclined to agree with the author. What many people fail to realize is that the full form of the scientific method (when applied properly) is: * make an observation * form a hypothesis that explains the observation * design a test to disprove the hypothesis * carry out the test and collect data * analyze the results and either reject the hypothesis or formulate a new test It is the necessity of a hypothesis to be falsifiable, and the intent of the scientist to disprove (not prove) their hypothesis that sets science apart.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Why then the seeming reluctance (as posted here recently) of journals to publish "failure to replicate" papers?

lisper 10y ago

The author of this article is profoundly ignorant. There is a scientific method. Exactly how and why it works are both very well understood. The correct answer was worked out by Karl Popper and popularized by David Deutsch. Writing about the scientific method without mentioning Popper is like writing about physics without mentioning Einstein. > James Blachowicz is a professor emeritus of philosophy Why am I not surprised.

jonsterling 10y ago
Oh yes, rando on Hacker News is far more educated about philosophy of science than an actual philosopher! Surely he knows about Popper (duh!).
- psyc 10y ago
  You may or may not be "right" in this particular case, but in general it's stupid to assume philosophers in the HN audience won't be drawn out to comment on such an article.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    I have a degree in philosophy and did quite a bit of my work in philosophy of science. I feel qualified to smugly dismiss lisper's comment as an example of the well-known phenomenon of tech people on HN assuming that mastery and understanding in one field translates to mastery and understanding in all fields, sight unseen. For example, defining just what is and is not "science" or "the scientific method" is something that scientists and philosophers of science have been working on for centuries. But this thread is full of HN randos basically chiming in with "here's my grade-school textbook's definition, guess we don't need all those so-called experts, lol". The level of not just ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, HN users routinely display in this kind of conversation is frankly staggering.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      So why didn't the author even mention falsification?

woodandsteel 10y ago

It is true, everything that scientists do is an extension and refinement of ways of getting at the truth found in ordinary living and various other fields of expert study. The main difference is that modern science systematically excludes supernatural explanations. Much of modern philosophy of science affirms this, such as Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. People want to dispute this basically because they are implicitly subscribing to the philosophical belief that what we ordinarily experience is simply mistaken, and the really real is radically different. This belief is common to metaphysical idealism (such as Platonism) and absolute mysticism, and also materialism, cartesian dualism, and classic analytic philosophy. Other philosophies, such as phenomenology, pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein, ground our knowledge of reality in our ordinary experience, instead of trying to escape into a radically different realm. A key issue at stake here is finitude. In the realm of ordinary experience, we experience we are limited in many ways, and this means we cannot escape suffering. The various anti-experiential philosophies generally believe that their alleged really real realms are such that we can escape such suffering.

coliveira 10y ago

The author demonstrates that he doesn't know what science is. There is much more than correct reasoning necessary to do science. For example, philosophers spent thousands of years pondering ideas in topics such as gravity and chemistry, without getting much ahead. And this is possible because there is a practically infinite number of ways in which the world could be explained using logic, but these explanations cannot be ruled in as true until you perform at least some experimentation. What makes science different is that it requires observation of the world and testing of hypothesis about the observed behavior. Without a rigorous process to do these things there is no science, only philosophical speculation.

powera 10y ago

This is clearly a piece targeted at a lay audience. It says basically nothing interesting about the scientific method or science, but a lot about the nature of defining words. It's basically word salad with a click-bait headline (thankfully fixed here).

jbandela1 10y ago

For myself, I think a good way to think of science is to consider the universe as a program, and that scientists are doing black box reverse engineering. We attempt to reverse engineer the mathematical logic of the universe based on observations, and once we think we have the mathematical "source code", we do experiments which compare the outputs of the source code (our mathematical models) with the outputs of the universe given the same set of inputs. There is even the analog of refactoring where a better overall "architecture" can dramatically simplify the "source code". An example would be the move from Ptolemy and epicycles to the heliocentric view of Copernicus and Kepler that greatly simplifies the "code" for planetary motions. In addition, just like when you test a function, extreme inputs can reveal bugs. Relativity and quantum mechanics came about in this manner. We had the Newtonion "source code" and it seemed to work very well in that the output of our source code matched the output of the universe for all values that we were able to supply as input. Then it became possible to measure the universe's outputs for velocities near the speed of light and masses that were subatomic. We then realized that our reverse engineered "source code" and the universe gave divergent answers. Based on this, Einstein rewrote the reverse engineered source code in such a way that it was both very elegant and matched the universe for velocities near the speed of light while still passing all the Newtonian unit tests. Bohr et al, wrote code, that matched the universe's output when feeling with subatomic particles. Unfortunately, while both the Einstein's code and Bohr's code both give correct answers, there is a giant if statement that governs whether we call Einstein or Bohr. Having that giant if statement and separate Einstein and Bohr functions is seen as not elegant and scientists have been trying to write a single function that gets rid of the if statement and still passes the Einstein and Bohr unit tests. This is called "grand unification". This model, at least for software people like me makes a lot of sense. For example, just like a unit test that fails gives you far more information than one that passes, so an experiment that diverges from the expected value of our current "source code" can tell us in which way our source code needs to be refined.

ajarmst 10y ago

Ignoring a huge body of scholarship (cf. Popper, Feyerabend, Kuhn) as well as a great deal of recent upheaval and critique on how properly to use 'science' to approach knowledge of real truth in favour of a facile, nay vacuous, and self-serving definition of the 'scientific method' just so you can claim it's nothing special is probably not in any way helpful. But apparently it will get you published in the New York Times.

maxerickson 10y ago
That's not what it is saying. It's saying that if the same tools can inform poetry then they aren't limited to being "scientific" methods.
- ajarmst 10y ago
  Wow. How did we poor benighted fools manage to stumble along without benefit of that penetrating insight?
  - dang 10y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
    - ajarmst 10y ago
      Fair point. How about we replace it with "the scientific method has always been about finding the best way to approach the real truth about a subject of enquiry, and to further refine that approach through further study. The object is, and always was, about truth. Of course it can be applied to poetry, insofar as there can be a 'truth' about poetry. The author's point is vacuous, because he presumes to resolve a conflict he himself invented or imagined."
ajarmst 10y ago
On reread, I give him too much credit. As he manages to misrepresent Science, Kepler and Socrates (hint: Plato's teacher was less interested in rigourously defining words than in establishing a foundation for an entire political philosophy when he says things like 'What is Justice?') in only a few hundred words, I'm going to assume this is some sort of farce that I just don't get.

alayne 10y ago

James Blachowicz, professor emeritus of philosophy with a focus on the philosophy of science according to his Loyola page wrote "Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry". I found 51 references to Popper searching the book on Amazon. I'm not a philosophy expert, but based on this article and wikipedia information about Popper and falsifiability, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest this guy actually knows what he's talking about and perhaps some of the commenters here aren't up to date on the science of philosophy issues he is addressing.

twblalock 10y ago
It's amazing how many people here think that philosophy of science ended with Karl Popper.
- cassowary 10y ago
  Karl Popper or Carl Sagan? I actually don't know the latter's views very well, but I very much get the impression that he popularised a Popperian view of science in a way that Saganites simply can't get past. A lot of people who think themself scientific and modern independent thinkers simply regurgitate what they learnt from scientific and modern independent thinkers.

return0 10y ago

He 's talking about scientific reasoning, not the scientific method. Empiricism is distinctly scientific.