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As a physicist, I think how we normally describe what you’re talking about is that there must be a robust and explanatory theory that goes along with experiment
by atty 5y ago
As a physicist, I think how we normally describe what you’re talking about is that there must be a robust and explanatory theory that goes along with experimental measurements. The most fruitful areas of research are the ones where theory and experiment exist on approximately the same level of what they can predict or measure. These strong explanatory theories are the things that generate truly robust, reproducible experiments.
In cases where there is significant differences in the maturity between theory and experiment, you either end up with theorists playing games with math, making up tons of unconstrained theories (string theory, for instance), or in the other direction you end up with experimentalists measuring anything and everything they can imagine, half of which is probably not theoretically enlightening, waiting for theorists to constrain their space of possible experiments to potentially fruitful paths.
Obviously this is harder for fields that don’t have models as robust as we do in physics, but I’d guess the same phenomenon happens everywhere.
- analog31 5y agoI'm a physicist too. A bad analogy is that theory and experiment are like plywood. The individual layers are weak, but criss crossing them against one another and gluing them together makes something that's quite strong.
- atty 5y agoI actually quite like that analogy - I may use that the next time I have a chance to teach.
- wombatmobile 5y agoYeah, why is it a "bad analogy"? I think there's something useful in it, possibly even essential.
- wombatmobile 5y agoClearly, for there to be chronic scientific progress, there must be some value in experimental practice. And yet widespread irreproducibility of results negates that value, by definition. So, where is the progress coming from? Your argument that "there must be a robust and explanatory theory that goes along with experimental results" helps make sense of TFA, which otherwise presents as a paradox, or a ruse to excuse shoddy practices. The presence of a viable theory is a useful heuristic for sorting useful experimental practice from less useful. At least, I imagine it is. How can we know for sure? Has anyone published a meta analysis that checks for this? And has that meta analysis been independently reproduced?