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Sincere question: could it be that the underlying structure of the universe is really simple but since we have no idea what it is we have to use exotic mathemat

Sincere question: could it be that the underlying structure of the universe is really simple but since we have no idea what it is we have to use exotic mathematics for it?

simonh 3y ago
That’s quite possible. A lot of what we think of as fundamental physics might turn out to be emergent behaviour. In fact that’s pretty much the story of the development of physics. It turns out Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity. Maxwells equations are emergent from quantum mechanics. The behaviour of bosons is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. As I understand it there are theoretical reasons to suspect that quarks do not have any decomposition though. We’ll see.
- esperent 3y ago
  > It turns out Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity. However relativity is far more complex than Newtonian physics.
  - simonh 3y ago
    That’s an interesting point, but I don’t think the complexity gradient from underlying causes to macroscopic effects always goes the same way. The macroscopic dynamic effects of an earthquake on a building can be modelled fairly easily. Trying to model the earthquake’s dynamics through the earth at the molecular level is a lost cause though.
  - evanb 3y ago
    The kinds of physical influences that are allowed in Newtonian physics are more general than those allowed in relativity. Relativity requires physics to satisfy constraints. Which is more complex depends on what you mean. There are fewer laws in the possibility space of generally-relativistic physics than Newtonian physics. So, which metric is more important? Less pleasant calculations or a larger search space? Your comment suggests you weigh the calculational simplicity more heavily, but most physicists would come down on the other side of the issue.
    - esperent 3y ago
      > most physicists would come down on the other side of the issue. What's your reason for saying this? I'm more on the mathematical side of things so I don't know that many physicists. But it's been my understanding that equations that are extremely difficult to solve, impossible to solve except numerically, or involve infinities that can't be explained, are a major pain point for physicists. I mean, that's the entire premise of this article.
      - eternalban 3y ago
        This could the universe's way of telling us that knowledge requires work, mathematically speaking.
      - peteradio 3y ago
        Theoretical physicists are like enterprise architects, there seems to be a preference for generality of prescription over practical experimentation/implementation.
      - evanb 3y ago
        My reasons are - I'm a professional physicist and most people I know professionally think this way. People like symmetry, it helps clarify things, simplify things, provides powerful principles. If the cost is practical difficulties, well, that's just the cost of doing business; the physical understanding offered by simpler rules is beneficial. I know at least 2 people mentioned in the article would agree with that. - I have no conceptual problem saying that the only solutions are numerical in nature if the principles are clear. Nobody promised physics should be easy. In fact some of the people mentioned in the article also have shown how their formal understanding might unlock better numerical methods! - Some infinities are worse than others, and a modern effective field theory perspective makes me not worry about most examples.* With a Wilsonian understanding, renormalization is perfectly simple to understand. For theories which have perturbative UV fixed points you can formulate a lattice discretization which flows to that fixed point and you never encounter any infinity along the way. Theories without a perturbative UV fixed point, well, that's where the trouble lies. Either there is no UV fixed point, in which case the theory is not valid for all energy scales and the troubling divergences point to an energy scale beyond which your theory is invalid. Or there IS a UV fixed point but it can only be found nonperturbatively. Handed a QFT with no perturbative UV fixed point, how should you decide? Well, one step back: should you, as a physicist, care? For instance, why should we worry whether QED as a standalone theory is UV-complete? We know that in the real world electrodynamics mixes with the weak force at high energy. So whether QED as a standalone theory is UV-complete is a question that I'm not worried about. It is an interesting mathematical question, and that can only be answered with new techniques, such as resurgence. For standalone QED it's a question of pure mathematics, as far as anyone can tell. That's what these tools are good for, at the moment. HOWEVER. I do admire the program of trying to show that more quantum field theories even exist mathematically, beyond the handful that we already know (which tend to have exotic properties). That seems important to me. But if it's false that's ALSO extremely interesting, it suggests that there are additional principles that we ought to understand. * except for gravity, where the divergences are SO bad that even the EFT approach has problems.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  > The behaviour of _bosons_ is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. I think you mean > The behaviour of _hadrons_ is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. -- Anyway, back to your main idea, the problem is that most of the times the new underlaying theory is even worse than the original one > Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity For Newtonian Mechanics you need only basic calculus. For General Relativity you need curvature, tensors, two definitions of derivatives and other nasty stuff. [I never saw the details, but it's in my todo list.] > Maxwells equations are emergent from quantum mechanics Well, electromagnetism is just the local gauge invariance of the U(1) group. The idea is very simple but each word in that sentence needs like one semester to be decoded. [I saw the calculations a long time ago. I don't remember the details, but I remember the general idea. I wrote a comment with a oversimplified version https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8189346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8189346 ) > there are theoretical reasons to suspect that quarks do not have any decomposition though. My favorite reason is that for a classic small ball, the ratio of the magnetic moment to the inertia moment is 1 (once you fix some nasty details about units), but for an elementary quantum particle it is 2. For composite particles, there is no theoretical value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics) The experimental value for protons is 5.5 and for Neutrons is 3.8, that is not surprising because we are sure they are composed particles. For Electrons and Muons it's slightly more than 2, but we understand that difference quite well (but not perfectly, and that is related to the main point of the article here). I don't think it has been measured directly for Quarks, but my guess is that it's used in some parts of the calculation of some Feynman diagrams, and if it were very different from 2 someone would have noticed.
  - simonh 3y ago
    Yes Hadrons sorry. Posting in a hurry. >most of the times the new underlaying theory is even worse than the original one Oh quite. Macroscopic emergent behaviour is often apparently simpler than the underlying causes and is in some way a generalisation of them.
    - gus_massa 3y ago
      It's strange because from galaxies to protons/neutrons/electrons it looks like the underlying theory is simpler. But if you try to look inside the protons it gets nastier each time you go down in the ladder of theories.
criddell 3y ago
Some think the underlying structure of the universe is mathematics. That is, the universe isn’t merely describe by mathematics, but it is a mathematical structure.
- tourgen 3y ago
  [dead]
- simonh 3y ago
  I see mathematics as a rigorous highly consistent descriptive language. Physics theories expressed mathematically are very precise descriptions of observed behaviour, but calling them laws is deceptive. The fact that they align precisely to observed behaviour just indicates that the behaviour of physical systems is highly consistent. Well, I hope so. If reality was inconsistent and things happened arbitrarily with no rhyme or reason I think we’d be in big trouble. I’m not totally unsympathetic to the view that maths is fundamental though. It’s an interesting way to think about it.
  - criddell 3y ago
    I wish I understood it better, but you don’t have to go much below classical mechanics before I’m lost. But from what I’ve read, the deeper you go, the more it’s difficult to find something other than mathematics. When you ask what is a particle you find out it’s probably an excitation of a quantum field. So what is a quantum field if not a mathematical structure? Is there a physical reality to wave function collapse? Maybe it doesn’t matter. The shut up and calculate crowd doesn’t seem to care.
    - simonh 3y ago
      The deeper we go the more objects we find that we can only describe using mathematics, for sure. That’s not the same as them being mathematics though. We don’t know what the essential nature of these objects is. It is an interesting speculation, but it’s also possible it’s just confusing the map for the terrain.
d--b 3y ago
This is Stephen Wolfram’s bet. He thinks the universe is based on simple computation rules. The emergence of complex traits from simple rules still requires exotic mathematics to describe macroscopically.
- eloff 3y ago
  I’m just a computer guy, but I also see that as likely. When it comes down to it there’s less than 100 elements, made of a handful of forces and subatomic particles that make up the incredible universe that we live in. It seems somehow to get simpler as you go down. Until you hit all the quantum weirdness and then it’s all wave functions and probabilities. That maybe comes out of something simple as well.
  - staunton 3y ago
    The first fundamental step in any physics model (or theory) is to separate the easily describable "laws" from the almost impossible to describe "state". The perhaps surprising question is why anything at all can be separated but if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be having this conversation. "Going down" simply means identifying laws that are more universal in that they can underly models of different systems, ideally "any known system". Quantum weirdness isn't significantly harder mathematically than what came before (we don't have an objective measure of how "hard" some piece of math is), it's just harder to relate to everyday experience. It's similar to how we got used to "masses attract each other" or "things just keep moving in a straight line", which seemed ridiculous to most of Newton's contemporaries.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      > Quantum weirdness isn't significantly harder mathematically than what came before (we don't have an objective measure of how "hard" some piece of math is), it's just harder to relate to everyday experience. We absolutely have a way to measure how hard a piece of math is: computational complexity. And quantum mecanichs is more computationally complex than newtonian mechanics (while general relativity is significantly harder still than both of them).
strogonoff 3y ago
The universe could be simpler than the current models suggest, but that would require taking a step back too far for the comfort of today’s STEM-oriented mind. For as long as natural sciences consider philosophy a load of hand-wavy abstract inapplicable hogwash they will be stuck iterating on existing physical models towards local maximum.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  Can you give an example of your philosophy physics being applied to a real world problem?
  - strogonoff 3y ago
    What do you mean by “philosophy physics”? Apart from that, I hope upon some reflection you realize that your sentence is an illustration of my point.
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      I reflected and I have no idea what you're talking about, since all you said was "physics is wrong" while giving no evidence.
      - staunton 3y ago
        I guess the intended meaning was that you chose your request ("apply what you say to a problem") based on certain philosophical criteria. I think that's actually a surprisingly valid point, given the original (downvoted) comment.
        CyberDildonics 3y ago
        Applying what someone claims is science is not a "philosophical criteria", that's how evidence and proof works.
nine_k 3y ago
Everything is simple, given the right notation (and the concepts underlying it). The original Maxwell theory of electromagnetism is about 10 rather involved equations. Maxwell-Heaviside form is 4 simpler equations. A formulation using differential 3-forms is 2 simple equations. A formulation using geometric algebra / Clifford algebra is one utterly simple equation.
- staunton 3y ago
  Number of equations != How simple something is
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Humans have a limited capacity of holding something before their "mind's eye", like 5-7 items. The simpler the equation is, the easier it is to understand and operate. Of course, it only works provided that the parts of the equation are well-understood, too. This way, the nabla symbol is very helpful in turning a group of (usually) 3 related PDEs into one pretty understandable one. Same for vector and matrix forms of common 2D and 3D transforms. Once you understand how these symbols work (they have a very regular structure), you can think at a bit higher level, and juggle with transforms that won't fit in your head in the scalar form, requiring toilsome operations on paper (or equivalent). Say, general relativity is hard as it is; without various notational tricks which abstract away some complexity, it would likely be completely unwieldy. A change of notation is like a refactoring in programming: a good set of powerful and well-defined functions makes the code to solve a problem significantly easier to produce and to understand, and harder to make an error.
    - staunton 3y ago
      Yes, good notation helps dealing with complexity. My point was that "number of equations" involved in a model or theory is not an objective measure of, really, anything. Every system of equations can be written as "A = 0" for a suitable definition of A. That doesn't make it simple.
WindyLakeReturn 3y ago
I think this ends up being a question that is the cousin of Bertrand's paradox. In that case, the English words in the original question, despite feeling concrete in what they ask for, leave enough vagueness to give different ways to solve the problem that all seem to satisfy the query but give incompatible answers. I say this because I see two similar phrases in your query that seem to carry equal levels of assumptions. First is the idea of simple. If something has a few very well defined rules that are understood in isolation, but whose emergent behavior is beyond our ability to define, is it simple? Conway's Game of Life is somewhat the default example. 2 very simple rules (or perhaps more, depending upon specifically how you count them), but it gives rise to a Turing complete system. Math itself is another example, as mathematicians seek to find simple rules from which math arises, yet even for the subsets of math that are limited to such rules, is it really fair to call it simple? The second idea is that of an underlying structure. Does the universe have an underlying structure, and even if it does, does that exist in side of some more foreign concept? What happens before the big bang? Why did the big bang happen when it did? Are there other universes, both from the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and universes that entirely separate from our own. These seem questions that feel almost entirely in the realm of science fiction, not physics, but there are plenty of theoretical physicists who dive into this field even though it currently doesn't produce testable hypothesis and is thus outside the scope of proper science.

Sincere question: could it be that the underlying structure of the universe is really simple but since we have no idea what it is we have to use exotic mathematics for it?

simonh 3y ago

That’s quite possible. A lot of what we think of as fundamental physics might turn out to be emergent behaviour. In fact that’s pretty much the story of the development of physics. It turns out Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity. Maxwells equations are emergent from quantum mechanics. The behaviour of bosons is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. As I understand it there are theoretical reasons to suspect that quarks do not have any decomposition though. We’ll see.

esperent 3y ago
> It turns out Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity. However relativity is far more complex than Newtonian physics.
- simonh 3y ago
  That’s an interesting point, but I don’t think the complexity gradient from underlying causes to macroscopic effects always goes the same way. The macroscopic dynamic effects of an earthquake on a building can be modelled fairly easily. Trying to model the earthquake’s dynamics through the earth at the molecular level is a lost cause though.
- evanb 3y ago
  The kinds of physical influences that are allowed in Newtonian physics are more general than those allowed in relativity. Relativity requires physics to satisfy constraints. Which is more complex depends on what you mean. There are fewer laws in the possibility space of generally-relativistic physics than Newtonian physics. So, which metric is more important? Less pleasant calculations or a larger search space? Your comment suggests you weigh the calculational simplicity more heavily, but most physicists would come down on the other side of the issue.
  - esperent 3y ago
    > most physicists would come down on the other side of the issue. What's your reason for saying this? I'm more on the mathematical side of things so I don't know that many physicists. But it's been my understanding that equations that are extremely difficult to solve, impossible to solve except numerically, or involve infinities that can't be explained, are a major pain point for physicists. I mean, that's the entire premise of this article.
    - eternalban 3y ago
      This could the universe's way of telling us that knowledge requires work, mathematically speaking.
    - peteradio 3y ago
      Theoretical physicists are like enterprise architects, there seems to be a preference for generality of prescription over practical experimentation/implementation.
    - evanb 3y ago
      My reasons are - I'm a professional physicist and most people I know professionally think this way. People like symmetry, it helps clarify things, simplify things, provides powerful principles. If the cost is practical difficulties, well, that's just the cost of doing business; the physical understanding offered by simpler rules is beneficial. I know at least 2 people mentioned in the article would agree with that. - I have no conceptual problem saying that the only solutions are numerical in nature if the principles are clear. Nobody promised physics should be easy. In fact some of the people mentioned in the article also have shown how their formal understanding might unlock better numerical methods! - Some infinities are worse than others, and a modern effective field theory perspective makes me not worry about most examples.* With a Wilsonian understanding, renormalization is perfectly simple to understand. For theories which have perturbative UV fixed points you can formulate a lattice discretization which flows to that fixed point and you never encounter any infinity along the way. Theories without a perturbative UV fixed point, well, that's where the trouble lies. Either there is no UV fixed point, in which case the theory is not valid for all energy scales and the troubling divergences point to an energy scale beyond which your theory is invalid. Or there IS a UV fixed point but it can only be found nonperturbatively. Handed a QFT with no perturbative UV fixed point, how should you decide? Well, one step back: should you, as a physicist, care? For instance, why should we worry whether QED as a standalone theory is UV-complete? We know that in the real world electrodynamics mixes with the weak force at high energy. So whether QED as a standalone theory is UV-complete is a question that I'm not worried about. It is an interesting mathematical question, and that can only be answered with new techniques, such as resurgence. For standalone QED it's a question of pure mathematics, as far as anyone can tell. That's what these tools are good for, at the moment. HOWEVER. I do admire the program of trying to show that more quantum field theories even exist mathematically, beyond the handful that we already know (which tend to have exotic properties). That seems important to me. But if it's false that's ALSO extremely interesting, it suggests that there are additional principles that we ought to understand. * except for gravity, where the divergences are SO bad that even the EFT approach has problems.
gus_massa 3y ago
> The behaviour of _bosons_ is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. I think you mean > The behaviour of _hadrons_ is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. -- Anyway, back to your main idea, the problem is that most of the times the new underlaying theory is even worse than the original one > Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity For Newtonian Mechanics you need only basic calculus. For General Relativity you need curvature, tensors, two definitions of derivatives and other nasty stuff. [I never saw the details, but it's in my todo list.] > Maxwells equations are emergent from quantum mechanics Well, electromagnetism is just the local gauge invariance of the U(1) group. The idea is very simple but each word in that sentence needs like one semester to be decoded. [I saw the calculations a long time ago. I don't remember the details, but I remember the general idea. I wrote a comment with a oversimplified version https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8189346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8189346 ) > there are theoretical reasons to suspect that quarks do not have any decomposition though. My favorite reason is that for a classic small ball, the ratio of the magnetic moment to the inertia moment is 1 (once you fix some nasty details about units), but for an elementary quantum particle it is 2. For composite particles, there is no theoretical value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics) The experimental value for protons is 5.5 and for Neutrons is 3.8, that is not surprising because we are sure they are composed particles. For Electrons and Muons it's slightly more than 2, but we understand that difference quite well (but not perfectly, and that is related to the main point of the article here). I don't think it has been measured directly for Quarks, but my guess is that it's used in some parts of the calculation of some Feynman diagrams, and if it were very different from 2 someone would have noticed.
- simonh 3y ago
  Yes Hadrons sorry. Posting in a hurry. >most of the times the new underlaying theory is even worse than the original one Oh quite. Macroscopic emergent behaviour is often apparently simpler than the underlying causes and is in some way a generalisation of them.
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    It's strange because from galaxies to protons/neutrons/electrons it looks like the underlying theory is simpler. But if you try to look inside the protons it gets nastier each time you go down in the ladder of theories.

criddell 3y ago

Some think the underlying structure of the universe is mathematics. That is, the universe isn’t merely describe by mathematics, but it is a mathematical structure.

tourgen 3y ago
[dead]
simonh 3y ago
I see mathematics as a rigorous highly consistent descriptive language. Physics theories expressed mathematically are very precise descriptions of observed behaviour, but calling them laws is deceptive. The fact that they align precisely to observed behaviour just indicates that the behaviour of physical systems is highly consistent. Well, I hope so. If reality was inconsistent and things happened arbitrarily with no rhyme or reason I think we’d be in big trouble. I’m not totally unsympathetic to the view that maths is fundamental though. It’s an interesting way to think about it.
- criddell 3y ago
  I wish I understood it better, but you don’t have to go much below classical mechanics before I’m lost. But from what I’ve read, the deeper you go, the more it’s difficult to find something other than mathematics. When you ask what is a particle you find out it’s probably an excitation of a quantum field. So what is a quantum field if not a mathematical structure? Is there a physical reality to wave function collapse? Maybe it doesn’t matter. The shut up and calculate crowd doesn’t seem to care.
  - simonh 3y ago
    The deeper we go the more objects we find that we can only describe using mathematics, for sure. That’s not the same as them being mathematics though. We don’t know what the essential nature of these objects is. It is an interesting speculation, but it’s also possible it’s just confusing the map for the terrain.

d--b 3y ago

This is Stephen Wolfram’s bet. He thinks the universe is based on simple computation rules. The emergence of complex traits from simple rules still requires exotic mathematics to describe macroscopically.

eloff 3y ago
I’m just a computer guy, but I also see that as likely. When it comes down to it there’s less than 100 elements, made of a handful of forces and subatomic particles that make up the incredible universe that we live in. It seems somehow to get simpler as you go down. Until you hit all the quantum weirdness and then it’s all wave functions and probabilities. That maybe comes out of something simple as well.
- staunton 3y ago
  The first fundamental step in any physics model (or theory) is to separate the easily describable "laws" from the almost impossible to describe "state". The perhaps surprising question is why anything at all can be separated but if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be having this conversation. "Going down" simply means identifying laws that are more universal in that they can underly models of different systems, ideally "any known system". Quantum weirdness isn't significantly harder mathematically than what came before (we don't have an objective measure of how "hard" some piece of math is), it's just harder to relate to everyday experience. It's similar to how we got used to "masses attract each other" or "things just keep moving in a straight line", which seemed ridiculous to most of Newton's contemporaries.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    > Quantum weirdness isn't significantly harder mathematically than what came before (we don't have an objective measure of how "hard" some piece of math is), it's just harder to relate to everyday experience. We absolutely have a way to measure how hard a piece of math is: computational complexity. And quantum mecanichs is more computationally complex than newtonian mechanics (while general relativity is significantly harder still than both of them).

strogonoff 3y ago

The universe could be simpler than the current models suggest, but that would require taking a step back too far for the comfort of today’s STEM-oriented mind. For as long as natural sciences consider philosophy a load of hand-wavy abstract inapplicable hogwash they will be stuck iterating on existing physical models towards local maximum.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
Can you give an example of your philosophy physics being applied to a real world problem?
- strogonoff 3y ago
  What do you mean by “philosophy physics”? Apart from that, I hope upon some reflection you realize that your sentence is an illustration of my point.
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    I reflected and I have no idea what you're talking about, since all you said was "physics is wrong" while giving no evidence.
    - staunton 3y ago
      I guess the intended meaning was that you chose your request ("apply what you say to a problem") based on certain philosophical criteria. I think that's actually a surprisingly valid point, given the original (downvoted) comment.
      - CyberDildonics 3y ago
        Applying what someone claims is science is not a "philosophical criteria", that's how evidence and proof works.

nine_k 3y ago

Everything is simple, given the right notation (and the concepts underlying it). The original Maxwell theory of electromagnetism is about 10 rather involved equations. Maxwell-Heaviside form is 4 simpler equations. A formulation using differential 3-forms is 2 simple equations. A formulation using geometric algebra / Clifford algebra is one utterly simple equation.

staunton 3y ago
Number of equations != How simple something is
- nine_k 3y ago
  Humans have a limited capacity of holding something before their "mind's eye", like 5-7 items. The simpler the equation is, the easier it is to understand and operate. Of course, it only works provided that the parts of the equation are well-understood, too. This way, the nabla symbol is very helpful in turning a group of (usually) 3 related PDEs into one pretty understandable one. Same for vector and matrix forms of common 2D and 3D transforms. Once you understand how these symbols work (they have a very regular structure), you can think at a bit higher level, and juggle with transforms that won't fit in your head in the scalar form, requiring toilsome operations on paper (or equivalent). Say, general relativity is hard as it is; without various notational tricks which abstract away some complexity, it would likely be completely unwieldy. A change of notation is like a refactoring in programming: a good set of powerful and well-defined functions makes the code to solve a problem significantly easier to produce and to understand, and harder to make an error.
  - staunton 3y ago
    Yes, good notation helps dealing with complexity. My point was that "number of equations" involved in a model or theory is not an objective measure of, really, anything. Every system of equations can be written as "A = 0" for a suitable definition of A. That doesn't make it simple.

WindyLakeReturn 3y ago

I think this ends up being a question that is the cousin of Bertrand's paradox. In that case, the English words in the original question, despite feeling concrete in what they ask for, leave enough vagueness to give different ways to solve the problem that all seem to satisfy the query but give incompatible answers. I say this because I see two similar phrases in your query that seem to carry equal levels of assumptions. First is the idea of simple. If something has a few very well defined rules that are understood in isolation, but whose emergent behavior is beyond our ability to define, is it simple? Conway's Game of Life is somewhat the default example. 2 very simple rules (or perhaps more, depending upon specifically how you count them), but it gives rise to a Turing complete system. Math itself is another example, as mathematicians seek to find simple rules from which math arises, yet even for the subsets of math that are limited to such rules, is it really fair to call it simple? The second idea is that of an underlying structure. Does the universe have an underlying structure, and even if it does, does that exist in side of some more foreign concept? What happens before the big bang? Why did the big bang happen when it did? Are there other universes, both from the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and universes that entirely separate from our own. These seem questions that feel almost entirely in the realm of science fiction, not physics, but there are plenty of theoretical physicists who dive into this field even though it currently doesn't produce testable hypothesis and is thus outside the scope of proper science.