6 ms·

Post-Empirical Science?

30 points by neonate 7y ago

Elrac 7y ago
Underneath the eloquent prose and the many helpful examples and showcases, this is an anti-science hit piece. How dare theoretical physicists develop ideas about the world around us that can't be quickly and obviously supported by real-world observations? It's apparent that science is in a crisis! We might as well just throw up our hands and place our faith in homeopathy and creationism, which are no better. Sorry, Mr. Baggott, that's a shitty argument for a target audience of stupid people. A counter-argument could be built on science stories like Ignatz Semmelweis' ideas about hand-washing before surgery. Semmelweis suspected that _something_ was transferred from cadavers to birthing mothers via the hands of unwashed surgeons, but he had no idea what that something was, and could certainly not provide empirical proof. He was later vindicated by the work of Pasteur and Koch. Too late for poor Dr. Semmelweis, who died in a nuthouse, but today hand washing is an essential practice in modern medicine. Mr. Baggott is telling us that science talks about things that are obviously real, like bacteria, but also things that may or may not be, such as multiverses. He's trying to convince us that because multiverses aren't obviously real, science shouldn't be talking or even thinking about them. He's implying that science is dishonest because it claims that multiverses are real. Actually, he's the one who's being dishonest, not science. Especially in fields where it's not feasible to stick the subject matter into a test tube, hypothesis and speculation are valid tools of science. Hypotheses are proposed with the expectation that science will later refute or substantiate them. Contrary to what Mr. Baggott brings across, this is part of science's process, a process that has proven wildly successful and valuable in the past. Most scientists are honest; and if asked by someone interested in more than a catchy headline, they'll gladly tell you which theories are solidly supported by a wealth of evidence, which are just ideas being thrown at the wall, and which are in between. People who fail to understand this are poorly informed; people who intentionally paper over the differences are dishonest. Please, let's ignore and shame that kind of people.
- pron 7y ago
  Here's an actual theoretical physicist, though, saying pretty much the same thing as the article not two weeks ago: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-physics-is-not-only-about.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-phys... : > Instead of examining the way that they propose hypotheses and revising their methods, theoretical physicists have developed a habit of putting forward entirely baseless speculations. Over and over again I have heard them justifying their mindless production of mathematical fiction as “healthy speculation” – entirely ignoring that this type of speculation has demonstrably not worked for decades and continues to not work. There is nothing healthy about this. It’s sick science. And, embarrassingly enough, that’s plain to see for everyone who does not work in the field. > This behavior is based on the hopelessly naïve, not to mention ill-informed, belief that science always progresses somehow, and that sooner or later certainly someone will stumble over something interesting. But even if that happened – even if someone found a piece of the puzzle – at this point we wouldn’t notice, because today any drop of genuine theoretical progress would drown in an ocean of “healthy speculation”. > And so, what we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    And it's just as stupid-sounding when it comes from somebody who has training and skills. Stupider-sounding, even. It's not like theoretical physicists have a perfect track record. Prior to modern thermodynamics, there were so many failed attempts to explain heat. Remember caloric? Phlogiston? The ultraviolet catastrophe? There have been periods of time where physics advances rapidly, and periods of time where there are long stalls and no good ideas. Additionally, it's pretty common for a theoretical idea to turn out to be extremely practical, just in a way that wasn't obvious at first. In the past 300 years, we've gone from complex numbers being "imaginary" to being standard components of quantum mechanics. While people of Cardano's time might say that square roots of real numbers aren't real, we today understand that QM requires complex amplitudes instead of classical probabilities. It's easy to point to where people can find interesting stuff to study. Einstein's work stemmed from noting that existing models of physics did not completely predict the solar system's behavior. Similarly, when we look at what these string theorists are aiming at, they turn out to have very reasonable idiosyncratic observations that they are trying to explain. They're examining the vacuum catastrophe, they're examining the Big Bang, they're examining quantum electronics. These are the places where our theories aren't able to explain every observation coherently; these are where we need new explanations.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  > this is an anti-science hit piece. You're needlessly painting the world black and white. Very few people are against science. This is not a hit piece. It's just a piece that you disagree with. That's fine, and I think your comment would be a lot stronger if it was formulated as such. EDIT: removed lots of needless snark.
- thanatropism 7y ago
  The orthodoxy says that "science is the scientific method", but I think we need to decouple core science as a humanitarian enterprise from the academic adventure. We should be able to deeply criticize science to its very core without losing a rhetoric that defends vaccines and so on.
m4r35n357 7y ago
Post-modern crap.
tempguy9999 7y ago
Opening words are "There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience [...]" Instantly wrong. Reproducibility and testable predictions are the distinctions.
- thanatropism 7y ago
  Darwin's "On the origin of the species" meets neither.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    An actual reply instead of a no-op downvote, thanks. Ok then, why does it not? I've not read it but this from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species ) "It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation." There is a further section that presents facts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#Summary_of_Darwin%27s_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#Summa...) which is a bit long to quote here. So, are you saying OTOOTS presents evidence but not the necessary reproducability, in which case I may agree, and the book is not scientific theory but a precursor to one? Or something else?
- analog31 7y ago
  Galileo's heliocentrism was unfalsifiable. As I understand it, the Church fathers were willing to accept a compromise view, that the planets go around the sun, and the sun around the earth. Galileo could propose no empirical test for his view that the sun is at the center. Such a test would have to wait for Newton, and then it became apparent that neither the sun nor the earth were necessarily the center.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    Well, from memory the church believed everything revolved around the earth. Galileo found the moons of jupiter clearly did not. This falsified the church's belief, or would have though they reportedly refused to look through the telescope. Unfalsifiability of heliocentrism... I'll take your word for it, point accepted.
lidHanteyk 7y ago
The author would do well to read more philosophy of science. Popper's over a century old; Quine's only just recently closer to Popper than to us! And the author doesn't even know about Quine. Edit: In particular, while Popper was very concerned with falsifiability and how to reject pseudoscience, Quine was concerned with compatibility and how well different theories fit together. Quine's view is useful for physics because it immediately highlights that relativity and QM work very well within themselves, but not with each other; therefore we know exactly where the interesting scientific discoveries ought to be found.
- thanatropism 7y ago
  Popper led us astray into a reductive outlook on science that led us directly to the replication crisis in the social sciences, Amy Cuddy and power poses and much more. People act like this is a mathematical problem and it can be fixed moving beyond p-values but it isn't. Quine had the better thesis, if only for the word "confirmational holism". Science must be holistic -- it must be one across all fields or at least hope to -- or it's a credentials game. As it stands now you can get credit for social science that contradicts physical anthropology directly and doesn't apologize for it. None of the truly great achievements of science were done through atomized conjectures and refutations. Newton, Lavoisier, Mendeleyev, Darwin -- they all posited entire worldviews that were supported by a patchwork accumulation of evidence. The challenges to Newtonian or Darwinian theory couldn't be merely empirical, they had to embody a whole philosophical attack on this worldview (preferably with evidence of its own -- but challenges to the evidence would never be enough to bring down Darwin in his time). Quine's confirmational holism might have highlighted the dissonance between GR and QM, but it might also have highlighted the differences between mid-19th century geology (which was beginning to discover deep time) and taxonomic biology. OTOH literally no experiment could be set up to evidence the importance of deep time in biology. Not without the fundamental insights of Darwin (and likeminded, less-accomplished contemporaries). We need to bury Popper.
  - zby 7y ago
    "None of the truly great achievements of science were done through atomized conjectures and refutations." - that is kind of tautology - only the big steps are called truly great - the small steps are just small steps.
evanpw 7y ago
slatestarcodex had a take on this recently: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on...
kingludite 7y ago
I find it somewhat of a hopeless discussion. One can explore any angle of science and reach a point where it looks insane and one can indoctrinate himself or train himself beyond that point. At that point you don't know anymore if you are on the cutting edge or if you are contributing to a new religion. The cutting edge might be useful and god might be real. I think we can humble ourselves with the idea that the unknown is so large that puny humans will never figure out a significant part of it. Our knowledge to the whole will always be near zero. This perspective makes practical things a lot more interesting or a lot more important. I think there is a sufficiently infinite amount of work left close to the applicable. Perhaps a good analogy is to first explore the forest close to the village rather than moving in a random direction. Its great of course to hear stories of far away lands but when it comes to funding we should aim to get something in return. At the same time we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things that seem implausible to us. There are plenty of empirical results out there that are dismissed outright and will never see publication. I use to play with magnets just for fun, in pure ignorance. I made quite a few setups that behaved in an interesting way to me. Nothing complicated, they take 1-10 min to make. When I told some book smart people they got angry and told me I was lying. I'm not trying to accomplish or refute anything. To me the effects were less interesting than their outright rejection. My ignorance of the art was quite the advantage. All I have is my hands and my eyes. You can't convince me I cant be seeing what I'm seeing but it is damn fascinating to see people try.
reilly3000 7y ago
Sabine Hossenfelder's work on the subject of the multiverse sums up this entire point very succinctly. I highly recommend the video linked in the article, too: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-multiverse-is-religion-not-science.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-multiverse-is-r...
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  I would agree that it isn't a scientific hypothesis, but it's an important perspective, in a similar way that heliocentrism was an important perspective as opposed to geocentrism+epicycles. For example, if we take Hossenfelder's argument and apply it to relativity, we have the argument that talking about a region of space is quite nonsensical because at any point in time an observer can only know that things in the past up to the distance light has travelled used to exist. But it is useful to model reality as a universe that can communicate at most at the speed of light. Now, our current experimentation and exploitation of high-particle physics is still sufficiently immature, and the computations sufficiently inefficient that we can, and have to still rely on obvious collapse events. But if you eventually wanted to talk about, say, the two systems converging to the same state or diverging from the same state, then the MWI is a useful perspective, modeling the evolution of universe-space.
t-h-e-chief 7y ago
Really enjoyed this article. I agree with some of the top comments, but still thoroughly the read.

30 points by neonate 7y ago

Underneath the eloquent prose and the many helpful examples and showcases, this is an anti-science hit piece. How dare theoretical physicists develop ideas about the world around us that can't be quickly and obviously supported by real-world observations? It's apparent that science is in a crisis! We might as well just throw up our hands and place our faith in homeopathy and creationism, which are no better. Sorry, Mr. Baggott, that's a shitty argument for a target audience of stupid people. A counter-argument could be built on science stories like Ignatz Semmelweis' ideas about hand-washing before surgery. Semmelweis suspected that _something_ was transferred from cadavers to birthing mothers via the hands of unwashed surgeons, but he had no idea what that something was, and could certainly not provide empirical proof. He was later vindicated by the work of Pasteur and Koch. Too late for poor Dr. Semmelweis, who died in a nuthouse, but today hand washing is an essential practice in modern medicine. Mr. Baggott is telling us that science talks about things that are obviously real, like bacteria, but also things that may or may not be, such as multiverses. He's trying to convince us that because multiverses aren't obviously real, science shouldn't be talking or even thinking about them. He's implying that science is dishonest because it claims that multiverses are real. Actually, he's the one who's being dishonest, not science. Especially in fields where it's not feasible to stick the subject matter into a test tube, hypothesis and speculation are valid tools of science. Hypotheses are proposed with the expectation that science will later refute or substantiate them. Contrary to what Mr. Baggott brings across, this is part of science's process, a process that has proven wildly successful and valuable in the past. Most scientists are honest; and if asked by someone interested in more than a catchy headline, they'll gladly tell you which theories are solidly supported by a wealth of evidence, which are just ideas being thrown at the wall, and which are in between. People who fail to understand this are poorly informed; people who intentionally paper over the differences are dishonest. Please, let's ignore and shame that kind of people.

pron 7y ago
Here's an actual theoretical physicist, though, saying pretty much the same thing as the article not two weeks ago: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-physics-is-not-only-about.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-phys... : > Instead of examining the way that they propose hypotheses and revising their methods, theoretical physicists have developed a habit of putting forward entirely baseless speculations. Over and over again I have heard them justifying their mindless production of mathematical fiction as “healthy speculation” – entirely ignoring that this type of speculation has demonstrably not worked for decades and continues to not work. There is nothing healthy about this. It’s sick science. And, embarrassingly enough, that’s plain to see for everyone who does not work in the field. > This behavior is based on the hopelessly naïve, not to mention ill-informed, belief that science always progresses somehow, and that sooner or later certainly someone will stumble over something interesting. But even if that happened – even if someone found a piece of the puzzle – at this point we wouldn’t notice, because today any drop of genuine theoretical progress would drown in an ocean of “healthy speculation”. > And so, what we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  And it's just as stupid-sounding when it comes from somebody who has training and skills. Stupider-sounding, even. It's not like theoretical physicists have a perfect track record. Prior to modern thermodynamics, there were so many failed attempts to explain heat. Remember caloric? Phlogiston? The ultraviolet catastrophe? There have been periods of time where physics advances rapidly, and periods of time where there are long stalls and no good ideas. Additionally, it's pretty common for a theoretical idea to turn out to be extremely practical, just in a way that wasn't obvious at first. In the past 300 years, we've gone from complex numbers being "imaginary" to being standard components of quantum mechanics. While people of Cardano's time might say that square roots of real numbers aren't real, we today understand that QM requires complex amplitudes instead of classical probabilities. It's easy to point to where people can find interesting stuff to study. Einstein's work stemmed from noting that existing models of physics did not completely predict the solar system's behavior. Similarly, when we look at what these string theorists are aiming at, they turn out to have very reasonable idiosyncratic observations that they are trying to explain. They're examining the vacuum catastrophe, they're examining the Big Bang, they're examining quantum electronics. These are the places where our theories aren't able to explain every observation coherently; these are where we need new explanations.
skrebbel 7y ago
> this is an anti-science hit piece. You're needlessly painting the world black and white. Very few people are against science. This is not a hit piece. It's just a piece that you disagree with. That's fine, and I think your comment would be a lot stronger if it was formulated as such. EDIT: removed lots of needless snark.
thanatropism 7y ago
The orthodoxy says that "science is the scientific method", but I think we need to decouple core science as a humanitarian enterprise from the academic adventure. We should be able to deeply criticize science to its very core without losing a rhetoric that defends vaccines and so on.

m4r35n357 7y ago

Post-modern crap.

tempguy9999 7y ago

Opening words are "There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience [...]" Instantly wrong. Reproducibility and testable predictions are the distinctions.

thanatropism 7y ago
Darwin's "On the origin of the species" meets neither.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  An actual reply instead of a no-op downvote, thanks. Ok then, why does it not? I've not read it but this from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species ) "It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation." There is a further section that presents facts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#Summary_of_Darwin%27s_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#Summa...) which is a bit long to quote here. So, are you saying OTOOTS presents evidence but not the necessary reproducability, in which case I may agree, and the book is not scientific theory but a precursor to one? Or something else?
analog31 7y ago
Galileo's heliocentrism was unfalsifiable. As I understand it, the Church fathers were willing to accept a compromise view, that the planets go around the sun, and the sun around the earth. Galileo could propose no empirical test for his view that the sun is at the center. Such a test would have to wait for Newton, and then it became apparent that neither the sun nor the earth were necessarily the center.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Well, from memory the church believed everything revolved around the earth. Galileo found the moons of jupiter clearly did not. This falsified the church's belief, or would have though they reportedly refused to look through the telescope. Unfalsifiability of heliocentrism... I'll take your word for it, point accepted.

lidHanteyk 7y ago

The author would do well to read more philosophy of science. Popper's over a century old; Quine's only just recently closer to Popper than to us! And the author doesn't even know about Quine. Edit: In particular, while Popper was very concerned with falsifiability and how to reject pseudoscience, Quine was concerned with compatibility and how well different theories fit together. Quine's view is useful for physics because it immediately highlights that relativity and QM work very well within themselves, but not with each other; therefore we know exactly where the interesting scientific discoveries ought to be found.

thanatropism 7y ago
Popper led us astray into a reductive outlook on science that led us directly to the replication crisis in the social sciences, Amy Cuddy and power poses and much more. People act like this is a mathematical problem and it can be fixed moving beyond p-values but it isn't. Quine had the better thesis, if only for the word "confirmational holism". Science must be holistic -- it must be one across all fields or at least hope to -- or it's a credentials game. As it stands now you can get credit for social science that contradicts physical anthropology directly and doesn't apologize for it. None of the truly great achievements of science were done through atomized conjectures and refutations. Newton, Lavoisier, Mendeleyev, Darwin -- they all posited entire worldviews that were supported by a patchwork accumulation of evidence. The challenges to Newtonian or Darwinian theory couldn't be merely empirical, they had to embody a whole philosophical attack on this worldview (preferably with evidence of its own -- but challenges to the evidence would never be enough to bring down Darwin in his time). Quine's confirmational holism might have highlighted the dissonance between GR and QM, but it might also have highlighted the differences between mid-19th century geology (which was beginning to discover deep time) and taxonomic biology. OTOH literally no experiment could be set up to evidence the importance of deep time in biology. Not without the fundamental insights of Darwin (and likeminded, less-accomplished contemporaries). We need to bury Popper.
- zby 7y ago
  "None of the truly great achievements of science were done through atomized conjectures and refutations." - that is kind of tautology - only the big steps are called truly great - the small steps are just small steps.

evanpw 7y ago

slatestarcodex had a take on this recently: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on...

kingludite 7y ago

I find it somewhat of a hopeless discussion. One can explore any angle of science and reach a point where it looks insane and one can indoctrinate himself or train himself beyond that point. At that point you don't know anymore if you are on the cutting edge or if you are contributing to a new religion. The cutting edge might be useful and god might be real. I think we can humble ourselves with the idea that the unknown is so large that puny humans will never figure out a significant part of it. Our knowledge to the whole will always be near zero. This perspective makes practical things a lot more interesting or a lot more important. I think there is a sufficiently infinite amount of work left close to the applicable. Perhaps a good analogy is to first explore the forest close to the village rather than moving in a random direction. Its great of course to hear stories of far away lands but when it comes to funding we should aim to get something in return. At the same time we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things that seem implausible to us. There are plenty of empirical results out there that are dismissed outright and will never see publication. I use to play with magnets just for fun, in pure ignorance. I made quite a few setups that behaved in an interesting way to me. Nothing complicated, they take 1-10 min to make. When I told some book smart people they got angry and told me I was lying. I'm not trying to accomplish or refute anything. To me the effects were less interesting than their outright rejection. My ignorance of the art was quite the advantage. All I have is my hands and my eyes. You can't convince me I cant be seeing what I'm seeing but it is damn fascinating to see people try.

reilly3000 7y ago

Sabine Hossenfelder's work on the subject of the multiverse sums up this entire point very succinctly. I highly recommend the video linked in the article, too: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-multiverse-is-religion-not-science.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-multiverse-is-r...

jhanschoo 7y ago
I would agree that it isn't a scientific hypothesis, but it's an important perspective, in a similar way that heliocentrism was an important perspective as opposed to geocentrism+epicycles. For example, if we take Hossenfelder's argument and apply it to relativity, we have the argument that talking about a region of space is quite nonsensical because at any point in time an observer can only know that things in the past up to the distance light has travelled used to exist. But it is useful to model reality as a universe that can communicate at most at the speed of light. Now, our current experimentation and exploitation of high-particle physics is still sufficiently immature, and the computations sufficiently inefficient that we can, and have to still rely on obvious collapse events. But if you eventually wanted to talk about, say, the two systems converging to the same state or diverging from the same state, then the MWI is a useful perspective, modeling the evolution of universe-space.

t-h-e-chief 7y ago

Really enjoyed this article. I agree with some of the top comments, but still thoroughly the read.