3 ms·

"only makes predictions that can't be tested" has always placed string theory outside the realm of science in my mind

• tzs 7y ago
  Doesn't that make what is or is not science somewhat up to chance? Suppose you develop a theory in order to explain the known results of experiments K1, K2, and K3. You have tuned any tunable parameters to make sure you theory is right for K1, K2, and K3. Then you calculate what results you would expect from your theory in other situations, S1 and S2. S1 and S2 were not taken into consideration when you developed the theory. It seems strange to me for whether or not your theory is "science" to depend on whether or not someone happens to have already looked at S1 and S2. Suppose on Earth the correct results for S1 and S2 were already known when you developed your theory. Then we discover there is intelligent life on Mars and their scientists have developed the same theory at about the same time, but no one had ever looked into S1 and S2 there until after the theory called attention to them. So the theory is not science on Earth but it is science on Mars? Does it cease to be science on Mars when we inform them that we knew the correct results for S1 and S2 before anyone on Earth or Mars developed the theory? If someone had come up with General Relativity in 1680, a few years before Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published in 1687, would Newtonian gravity have not been science? (I'm assuming that at the time the small differences between Newtonian gravity and GR would be below what they could detect experimentally).
  • papreclip 7y ago
    string theory doesn't have experiments. that's my point