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>it's fair to criticize any physicist who establishes a theory to be beyond testability and continues work on it Would the same apply to people who further exp
by SkyBelow 7y ago
>it's fair to criticize any physicist who establishes a theory to be beyond testability and continues work on it
Would the same apply to people who further explore questions like P = NP and what happens if it is true or false or what happens if the Riemann hypothesis is true? Sometimes digging more into something that doesn't seem testable results in a finding that is testable or into knowledge that helps advance a related field.
I think the deeper question is, how do we make sure that public money is spent in a justifiable fashion. And when it comes to science that is a hard question to answer, especially if one considers that science works a bit differently than the way the average voter thinks about things when it comes to notion such as proven or disproven.
- andrewflnr 7y agoIt might apply if P=NP or the Riemann hypothesis were remotely the same thing. An open mathematical conjecture has uncertainty about whether effort into cracking it will produce fruit. That's entirely different from a physical theory where it certainly cannot be tested.
- chr1 7y agoAny physical theory that cannot be tested is a mathematical theory that can produce results useful in other places. In general all of theoretical physics is mathematics that takes inspiration from experiments, and takes shortcuts when proving theorems:).