3 ms·

Believing something and it being science are unrelated, my first post mentions I find a multiverse idea likely philosophically.

lmm 6y ago
Well, would you say that the proposition that e.g. Jupiter exists science, or not? I can't reach out and touch it, so I'm only ever going to have indirect evidence for its existence.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Those kind of prepositions are not science. We have experimental evidence showing that a planet we call Jupiter behaves in a certain way, but whether anything exists is a philosophical question. Further, reaching out and touching it would not provide better evidence than we currently have.
  - lmm 6y ago
    > We have experimental evidence showing that a planet we call Jupiter behaves in a certain way We have experimental evidence that certain light patterns have been observed. For any theory that has Jupiter in it, you could make the same theory without involving Jupiter. I don't see any fundamental difference between the evidence for Jupiter and the evidence for the multiverse.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Jupiter has a number of characteristics that we can observe, such as gravity, that are best described by the theory of being a planet, heavily simplified. edit and if we remove Jupiter from our theory, we have a ton of observational data that now does not fit our theory. Another universe, basically by definition, has no observable characteristics. We can seemingly only observe our universe, and have no way of knowing if something unobservable is impacting our universe.
      - lmm 6y ago
        > Jupiter has a number of characteristics that we can observe, such as gravity, that are best described by the theory of being a planet, heavily simplified. edit and if we remove Jupiter from our theory, we have a ton of observational data that now does not fit our theory. Sure, but isn't it the same for multiverse theories? Obviously we don't observe the multiverse directly, but we observe data for which the best explanation also implies a multiverse, just as the best explanation for various observations implies the planet Jupiter. > Another universe, basically by definition, has no observable characteristics. We can seemingly only observe our universe, and have no way of knowing if something unobservable is impacting our universe. There's a lot we can't observe or interact with directly; we can't interact with the past, we can't observe the future, we have to real way of interacting with distant galaxies, we can't actually observe inflation at all... a good multiverse theory (of which I'm not sure there are any, but I think they're possible in principle) would be in much the same category as inflation AFAICS: we can't observe the thing itself but we can observe things that seem most likely to be consequences of it.
        boomboomsubban 6y ago
        >Obviously we don't observe the multiverse directly, but we observe data for which the best explanation also implies a multiverse No, we don't have observational data supporting a theory of a multiverse. With Jupiter, if there were a planet there we would expect x to happen due to our understanding of planetary physics. We then observe, and x happens. We can't repeat this with a multiverse, as all of our observational data ever provides no insight into how another universe works. Two people keep saying this, it is easy to prove me wrong here. >There's a lot we can't observe or interact with directly; None of which are science. We have past observations, and we can make predictions of the future, but that's basically the extent of their place in science. We do observe distant galaxies, and that's where are understanding of them comes from. As for inflation, like of space? As we do have experimental data for that, something about how long light takes to reach us. If you're talking economics, very little of it is science.
        lmm 6y ago

lmm 6y ago

Well, would you say that the proposition that e.g. Jupiter exists science, or not? I can't reach out and touch it, so I'm only ever going to have indirect evidence for its existence.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
Those kind of prepositions are not science. We have experimental evidence showing that a planet we call Jupiter behaves in a certain way, but whether anything exists is a philosophical question. Further, reaching out and touching it would not provide better evidence than we currently have.
- lmm 6y ago
  > We have experimental evidence showing that a planet we call Jupiter behaves in a certain way We have experimental evidence that certain light patterns have been observed. For any theory that has Jupiter in it, you could make the same theory without involving Jupiter. I don't see any fundamental difference between the evidence for Jupiter and the evidence for the multiverse.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Jupiter has a number of characteristics that we can observe, such as gravity, that are best described by the theory of being a planet, heavily simplified. edit and if we remove Jupiter from our theory, we have a ton of observational data that now does not fit our theory. Another universe, basically by definition, has no observable characteristics. We can seemingly only observe our universe, and have no way of knowing if something unobservable is impacting our universe.
    - lmm 6y ago
      > Jupiter has a number of characteristics that we can observe, such as gravity, that are best described by the theory of being a planet, heavily simplified. edit and if we remove Jupiter from our theory, we have a ton of observational data that now does not fit our theory. Sure, but isn't it the same for multiverse theories? Obviously we don't observe the multiverse directly, but we observe data for which the best explanation also implies a multiverse, just as the best explanation for various observations implies the planet Jupiter. > Another universe, basically by definition, has no observable characteristics. We can seemingly only observe our universe, and have no way of knowing if something unobservable is impacting our universe. There's a lot we can't observe or interact with directly; we can't interact with the past, we can't observe the future, we have to real way of interacting with distant galaxies, we can't actually observe inflation at all... a good multiverse theory (of which I'm not sure there are any, but I think they're possible in principle) would be in much the same category as inflation AFAICS: we can't observe the thing itself but we can observe things that seem most likely to be consequences of it.
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        >Obviously we don't observe the multiverse directly, but we observe data for which the best explanation also implies a multiverse No, we don't have observational data supporting a theory of a multiverse. With Jupiter, if there were a planet there we would expect x to happen due to our understanding of planetary physics. We then observe, and x happens. We can't repeat this with a multiverse, as all of our observational data ever provides no insight into how another universe works. Two people keep saying this, it is easy to prove me wrong here. >There's a lot we can't observe or interact with directly; None of which are science. We have past observations, and we can make predictions of the future, but that's basically the extent of their place in science. We do observe distant galaxies, and that's where are understanding of them comes from. As for inflation, like of space? As we do have experimental data for that, something about how long light takes to reach us. If you're talking economics, very little of it is science.
        lmm 6y ago