3 ms·

>"I had no idea about all the controversy around how gravity "actually" works until I read a book on string theory" FYI, there seems to be quite a bit of contr

by nonbel 10y ago

>"I had no idea about all the controversy around how gravity "actually" works until I read a book on string theory" FYI, there seems to be quite a bit of controversy regarding whether string theory is even science: >'Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science from attack.”' https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philo...

ajkjk 10y ago
I think it's not correct to hold this kind of physics to the standard of science that other disciplines use. The standard, scientific method version of science is 'guess a model of how the world works, then run an experiment to see if it's true'. This packages (hides, even) a bunch of principles of rational thought inside of it - for instance, that a stance about how the world works had to be able to be wrong, and that you should be picking your opinions about how the world works based on what you can (repeatedly) demonstrate. But there are other paths to knowledge- and revelation- gaining that are performed by scientists all the time, yet don't fit this model. It's perfectly legitimate to get a grant to run an experiment to just look at something closely, such as a star or a blank patch of sky, or a material, or an organism. 'I want to collect data on X' is perfectly legitimate as a way to learn about the world. After all you need observations about something in order to build the initial model that you use to generate hypotheses in the Scientific Method (tm) anyway. Another example: sometimes experiments are done just to find more accurate readings of numerical constants. Anyway, mathematicians and the more theoretical physicists aren't really looking to run experiments to test hypotheses. Instead their 'experiments' are finding new models for looking at things and their 'results' are finding new mathematical statements, or finding ways to prove things that were previously hard to prove, or just finding new ways of looking at things that make thinking about them easier. This is 'output', and a net gain in human knowledge, without being a testable hypothesis, and I think that's fine. It's still subject to the underlying rationalism behind science. But validation is entirely theoretical: a good theory makes things make sense, and doesn't make things not make sense in ways that disagree with physical experiments, and makes things simpler and better. And it's fine that these criteria are abstract and to an extent subjective. Of course it's still necessary to have a way to say if theorists are failing, or wasting their time, or producing too little or too quality output, and I don't know how that's done or it ought to be done. But it doesn't bother me that they don't produce physically testable results.
bmh100 10y ago
I think it is important to keep in mind that theories can sometimes only become testable after sometimes unforeseen advances in technology. Consider the Higgs field, theorized in 1964 [1]. This field was only detected, via the Higgs boson, in 2012 [2]. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [3] and its computing grid, which detected the Higgs boson, generated 25 PB of data per year, had 150 PB storage, and 200,000 processing cores [4] (which I assume were at least 1 GHz on average). In the 1960s, the Cray CDC 7600 supercomputer had a computing speed of 36.4 MHz and 65 kword memory [5], and IBM produced the 1311 HDD with about 12 MB storage [6]. Thus, the LHC required advances in fiber optic cables, a 5-million-times increase in computing over existing state-of-the-art processors, an 89-million-times increase in computer storage (from 12 MB to assuming 1 TB per HDD), and integrated-circuit RAM. More directly, the 1971 ISR hadron collider had energies of 31.5 GeV [7] compared to the LHC's 6.5 TeV [8], 200x increase. What other theories might become testable if we could reach 130 TeV, analyzed by a computing grid with 1 trillion processors and 1 yottabyte of storage? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_pap... [2]: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-the-higgs-boson-was-found-4723520/?all http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-the-higgs-b... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_LHC_Computing_Grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_LHC_Computing_Grid [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_7600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_7600 [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_1311 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d... [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersecting_Storage_Rings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersecting_Storage_Rings [8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

by nonbel 10y ago

ajkjk 10y ago

I think it's not correct to hold this kind of physics to the standard of science that other disciplines use. The standard, scientific method version of science is 'guess a model of how the world works, then run an experiment to see if it's true'. This packages (hides, even) a bunch of principles of rational thought inside of it - for instance, that a stance about how the world works had to be able to be wrong, and that you should be picking your opinions about how the world works based on what you can (repeatedly) demonstrate. But there are other paths to knowledge- and revelation- gaining that are performed by scientists all the time, yet don't fit this model. It's perfectly legitimate to get a grant to run an experiment to just look at something closely, such as a star or a blank patch of sky, or a material, or an organism. 'I want to collect data on X' is perfectly legitimate as a way to learn about the world. After all you need observations about something in order to build the initial model that you use to generate hypotheses in the Scientific Method (tm) anyway. Another example: sometimes experiments are done just to find more accurate readings of numerical constants. Anyway, mathematicians and the more theoretical physicists aren't really looking to run experiments to test hypotheses. Instead their 'experiments' are finding new models for looking at things and their 'results' are finding new mathematical statements, or finding ways to prove things that were previously hard to prove, or just finding new ways of looking at things that make thinking about them easier. This is 'output', and a net gain in human knowledge, without being a testable hypothesis, and I think that's fine. It's still subject to the underlying rationalism behind science. But validation is entirely theoretical: a good theory makes things make sense, and doesn't make things not make sense in ways that disagree with physical experiments, and makes things simpler and better. And it's fine that these criteria are abstract and to an extent subjective. Of course it's still necessary to have a way to say if theorists are failing, or wasting their time, or producing too little or too quality output, and I don't know how that's done or it ought to be done. But it doesn't bother me that they don't produce physically testable results.

bmh100 10y ago

I think it is important to keep in mind that theories can sometimes only become testable after sometimes unforeseen advances in technology. Consider the Higgs field, theorized in 1964 [1]. This field was only detected, via the Higgs boson, in 2012 [2]. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [3] and its computing grid, which detected the Higgs boson, generated 25 PB of data per year, had 150 PB storage, and 200,000 processing cores [4] (which I assume were at least 1 GHz on average). In the 1960s, the Cray CDC 7600 supercomputer had a computing speed of 36.4 MHz and 65 kword memory [5], and IBM produced the 1311 HDD with about 12 MB storage [6]. Thus, the LHC required advances in fiber optic cables, a 5-million-times increase in computing over existing state-of-the-art processors, an 89-million-times increase in computer storage (from 12 MB to assuming 1 TB per HDD), and integrated-circuit RAM. More directly, the 1971 ISR hadron collider had energies of 31.5 GeV [7] compared to the LHC's 6.5 TeV [8], 200x increase. What other theories might become testable if we could reach 130 TeV, analyzed by a computing grid with 1 trillion processors and 1 yottabyte of storage? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_pap... [2]: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-the-higgs-boson-was-found-4723520/?all http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-the-higgs-b... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_LHC_Computing_Grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_LHC_Computing_Grid [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_7600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_7600 [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_1311 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d... [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersecting_Storage_Rings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersecting_Storage_Rings [8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider