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Not possible. Theory comes first. Scientists need a theory first to know which experiments to do. Any interesting experimental results are interesting precisel

Not possible. Theory comes first. Scientists need a theory first to know which experiments to do. Any interesting experimental results are interesting precisely because they do not conform to the existing theories. Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

robinduckett 3y ago
So before Isaac Newton, apples would float up off the tree when they fell?
- tdehnel 3y ago
  The pre-existing theory Newton needed was “things move when other things act on them.” Without that, the observation would be meaningless. Seeing the apple fall told Newton “some unseen force is acting on the apple.” Incidentally, this was wrong. There is no “force”, only a warping of space time.
__sy__ 3y ago
For the wetter sciences, the answer is somewhere in between. We usually have somewhat of an understanding of the prior theory. We then throw a lot of stuff at the wall…. Oh, this sticks? Eh, why? And then usually some more clever person will come up with reasons for why X works beyond what we already knew. A few years later, the field reaches some sort of consensus around one of the hypothesis.
- tdehnel 3y ago
  The “oh this sticks” part is only ever interesting precisely because it doesn’t conform to the pre existing theory. You cannot even make an observation without theories baked in: - Normally these things do X - My senses or instruments are detecting reality accurately - This thing I’m measuring will result in something interesting etc
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    This is only true from the perspective of developing new theories for why are things happen. Of course new theories arise from other theories. It's not true for Discovery in general. New phenomenon can be created and observed without any theory for why they occur, either before or after observation
    - tdehnel 3y ago
      You can't even observe something without theories. For example: - I need to observe here and not anywhere else - I can reliably interpret my senses/the instrumentation is working correctly - Objects of this type normally behave in X way, because of Y - etc Think of it a different way. You can come up with a theory without any observation whatsoever. Black holes, for example, were conjectured well before they were observed.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        Well sure, that's the point that you're trying to make. I thought anything most people felt you were claiming you need a theory related to the novel Discovery or convention. That is to say how it might work and what the expected outcomes are. I can't go to the lab without a theory that my car can get me there. That doesn't mean I have a hypothesis for what will happen when I mix two substances in the lab. Thinking that something will either happen or not happen if I mix those two substances is not a theory.
        tdehnel 3y ago
        > Thinking that something will either happen or not happen if I mix those two substances is not a theory. OK I'll bite. What is it then?
        s1artibartfast 3y ago
        Nothing, just words that don't have any predictive value or convey any understanding of the world. Maybe an example would help clear things up. go into the lab with a 1 lb weight and a 2 lb weight and weigh them together. Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works. It might be a theory that a scale display a value when I put things on top of it, but that is a different topic, and not what I'm testing. This Theory doesn't tell me how the world works and if the expected value is 0 lb, 3 lb, or 1 million pounds. I could go into the lab with no operating Theory or hypothesis on what the value of two masses should be when added together and collect data. I can collect data with no expectation of correlation, and after measuring the combination of many weights, deduce that there is a relation between the combined weights and the total mass, and in fact it is a simple sum.
sdenton4 3y ago
Hope the air's good in the tower... Good science has often proceeded from 'weird' observations, leading to experiments trying to isolate the weirdness. The weird is necessarily outside the zone of existing theory, and requires experimentation to recreate the effect reliably and quantifiably. Once that's done, you can iterate on conjectures and experiments to try to get to the bottom of what's going on. In reality, I suspect that the divide between theorists and experimentalists is really only a fundamental physics thing. And physics has been more-or-less at an impasse for the last thirty years, so that there are relatively few experiments worth running, and the bulk of the theorists are just (making stuff/rebranding as mathematicians) up because they don't know what else to do. In other areas, there's so much weird still untouched that you don't get the same division of labor. Take a look at CRISPR - there was a lot of bench work and curiosity-driven exploration involved, simply because there was no theory describing what they were discovering... Or machine learning - the theory is still quite tenuous and mainly follows the experimental results.
- tdehnel 3y ago
  To consider an observation “weird” you need a theory about what a normal observation looks like. Additionally, all observations require baked in theories about the observation being accurate. Btw, I didn’t appreciate your insulting first sentence. Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    If we are sufficiently expansive in our definition of what theory is, then sure, there is no experiment without theory, and experimentalists only discover things by being secretly theorists who occasionally stop thinking long enough to get their hands dirty. But I don't think this is typically what is meant by 'theory.' CRISPR is again a good example - the initial 'weirdness' was an observation of lots of long-ish palindromic subsequences in bacterial DNA. To my knowledge, there was no pre-existing theory on the preponderance of palindromic subsequences in DNA. Now, we could say that these researchers were proceeding from a theory that there's no easily discernable combinatorial macroscopic structure in DNA sequences, but I think that this would stretch the idea of 'theory' beyond common usage or even usefulness: There's no theorem or axioms of DNA sequencing being violated here. In fact, I would expect that weirdness is a good sign of missing theory - a repeatable observation which is unsupported by existing theory. For perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, we see an explicit violation of Newtonian mechanics, but in many other cases (like CRISPR and palindromic subsequences) we have observations of structure in areas where theory simply does not yet exist. (Apologies for the harsh first sentence; FWIW, your comment seemed belittling of the work of a large fraction of important scientists.)
klabb3 3y ago
> Not possible. Theory comes first. I used to think this way but it’s significantly more liberating and true to see theory as plausible explanations. Theories are very often afterthoughts, where the utility is prediction of new events, or narrowing the search space of experiments. A theory explaining past events only is not really a theory at all. But you can narrow search space in many ways without elaborate theories. For instance, you may assume that since birds can fly, if we make a machine that looks similar, we might be able to fly as well. Terribly simplistic theory, but nevertheless a good starting point.
- tdehnel 3y ago
  Calling theories useful if they predict future events is called Instrumentalism and it’s a dead end if your goal is to understand reality. “The magician will pull a rabbit from the hat” might reliably predict what happens, and be testable, but it is not a good scientific explanation because it doesn’t help anyone understand how the trick works.
imtringued 3y ago
You are assuming that we have thought of all theories that an experiment can confirm, before conducting the experiment. Considering the large search space, that would be quite surprising.
- tdehnel 3y ago
  Can you tell me why a scientist would decide to do a certain experiment without a theory about what to test and why? Why that experiment and not any of infinite others?
  - ajuc 3y ago
    Because he already has a sample and it doesn't hurt to check other properties of it.
    - tdehnel 3y ago
      Which properties to check? Why that sample and not countless others? Why not spend the rest of his life checking different properties of the one sample?
      - ajuc 3y ago
        Whatever suits your fancy. > Why not spend the rest of his life checking different properties of the one sample? The material in question is called LK-99 because it was first produced in 1999. Why not, indeed :) ?
  - robwwilliams 3y ago
    We do this much of the time in genetics, genomics, and neuroscience. New technology; Large set of samples; Quantify x<1> … x<n> mRNAs, proteins, lipids, metabolites; Estimate how units stick together (statistically or literally); Develop a “theory” of what units and groups of units interact to account for and predict higher order phenotypes (risk of neurodegeneration; lifespan). Data take precedence. Mini-theories of molecular and cellular causality are assembled with some basic brain power and yes—-a dollop of theory and priors—-on the back of a massive pool of well structured data. Exploratory biology of this type is/was insulted using the terms “fishing” or “mere description” but with current high throughput and high content technologies should be considered research “trawling” and factory-level science; not a cottage industry of small labs. This new style of science can be highly effective in biology and in astronomy as we are learning from Webb. But it bugs the hell out of some classically trained reductionists who demand that clear hypotheses should drive science forward. Much of the progress in modern biology falls into this alternative almost hypothesis-free style. I would say “story-free” style of science. Too damn many story-tellers.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jack_riminton 3y ago
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …” — Isaac Asimov
- tdehnel 3y ago
  “That’s funny…” implies you had a pre existing theory about how it was supposed to work.
  - overboard2 3y ago
    You don't need a preexisting theory though, you just need to lack one that explains the results of an experiment
    - tdehnel 3y ago
      Why would someone do an experiment without a theory to test? How would they know that a particular result was interesting without a theory about the expected result?
      - foodjinn 3y ago
        Because rubbing your chin doesn't accomplish anything, messing around with stuff does.
        tdehnel 3y ago
        There are practically infinite combinations of things to mess around with. Which stuff do scientists choose to mess around with and why?
        foodjinn 3y ago
        [dead]
  - SanderNL 3y ago
ajuc 3y ago
We discovered first "crystal diodes" in 1870s. There was a whole idustry doing "magic needle+crystal diodes" without understanding why they work. They just knew you had to touch a special spot on the crystal with a needle. Some spots worked better than others. It was art not science. We had the first theory on how they operate in 1920s. Eventually we got transistors from that theory in 1950s.
davidivadavid 3y ago
While correct you're being downvoted because you're equivocating on the term "theory." People are assuming you're talking about a fully baked, documented theory couched in precise language and equations. What you're actually talking about is tacit assumptions / models that are built in observations. "Theory comes first" is particularly unfortunate wording because it seems to imply the naive point of view that people first come up with a thorough mathematical model of some phenomenon before testing and validating it with experiments. That's obviously not how science has worked throughout history. Saying "all observations/measurements imply an underlying theory" would have been maybe more accurate.

robinduckett 3y ago

So before Isaac Newton, apples would float up off the tree when they fell?

tdehnel 3y ago
The pre-existing theory Newton needed was “things move when other things act on them.” Without that, the observation would be meaningless. Seeing the apple fall told Newton “some unseen force is acting on the apple.” Incidentally, this was wrong. There is no “force”, only a warping of space time.

__sy__ 3y ago

For the wetter sciences, the answer is somewhere in between. We usually have somewhat of an understanding of the prior theory. We then throw a lot of stuff at the wall…. Oh, this sticks? Eh, why? And then usually some more clever person will come up with reasons for why X works beyond what we already knew. A few years later, the field reaches some sort of consensus around one of the hypothesis.

tdehnel 3y ago
The “oh this sticks” part is only ever interesting precisely because it doesn’t conform to the pre existing theory. You cannot even make an observation without theories baked in: - Normally these things do X - My senses or instruments are detecting reality accurately - This thing I’m measuring will result in something interesting etc
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  This is only true from the perspective of developing new theories for why are things happen. Of course new theories arise from other theories. It's not true for Discovery in general. New phenomenon can be created and observed without any theory for why they occur, either before or after observation
  - tdehnel 3y ago
    You can't even observe something without theories. For example: - I need to observe here and not anywhere else - I can reliably interpret my senses/the instrumentation is working correctly - Objects of this type normally behave in X way, because of Y - etc Think of it a different way. You can come up with a theory without any observation whatsoever. Black holes, for example, were conjectured well before they were observed.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      Well sure, that's the point that you're trying to make. I thought anything most people felt you were claiming you need a theory related to the novel Discovery or convention. That is to say how it might work and what the expected outcomes are. I can't go to the lab without a theory that my car can get me there. That doesn't mean I have a hypothesis for what will happen when I mix two substances in the lab. Thinking that something will either happen or not happen if I mix those two substances is not a theory.
      - tdehnel 3y ago
        > Thinking that something will either happen or not happen if I mix those two substances is not a theory. OK I'll bite. What is it then?
        s1artibartfast 3y ago
        Nothing, just words that don't have any predictive value or convey any understanding of the world. Maybe an example would help clear things up. go into the lab with a 1 lb weight and a 2 lb weight and weigh them together. Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works. It might be a theory that a scale display a value when I put things on top of it, but that is a different topic, and not what I'm testing. This Theory doesn't tell me how the world works and if the expected value is 0 lb, 3 lb, or 1 million pounds. I could go into the lab with no operating Theory or hypothesis on what the value of two masses should be when added together and collect data. I can collect data with no expectation of correlation, and after measuring the combination of many weights, deduce that there is a relation between the combined weights and the total mass, and in fact it is a simple sum.

sdenton4 3y ago

Hope the air's good in the tower... Good science has often proceeded from 'weird' observations, leading to experiments trying to isolate the weirdness. The weird is necessarily outside the zone of existing theory, and requires experimentation to recreate the effect reliably and quantifiably. Once that's done, you can iterate on conjectures and experiments to try to get to the bottom of what's going on. In reality, I suspect that the divide between theorists and experimentalists is really only a fundamental physics thing. And physics has been more-or-less at an impasse for the last thirty years, so that there are relatively few experiments worth running, and the bulk of the theorists are just (making stuff/rebranding as mathematicians) up because they don't know what else to do. In other areas, there's so much weird still untouched that you don't get the same division of labor. Take a look at CRISPR - there was a lot of bench work and curiosity-driven exploration involved, simply because there was no theory describing what they were discovering... Or machine learning - the theory is still quite tenuous and mainly follows the experimental results.

tdehnel 3y ago
To consider an observation “weird” you need a theory about what a normal observation looks like. Additionally, all observations require baked in theories about the observation being accurate. Btw, I didn’t appreciate your insulting first sentence. Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness
- sdenton4 3y ago
  If we are sufficiently expansive in our definition of what theory is, then sure, there is no experiment without theory, and experimentalists only discover things by being secretly theorists who occasionally stop thinking long enough to get their hands dirty. But I don't think this is typically what is meant by 'theory.' CRISPR is again a good example - the initial 'weirdness' was an observation of lots of long-ish palindromic subsequences in bacterial DNA. To my knowledge, there was no pre-existing theory on the preponderance of palindromic subsequences in DNA. Now, we could say that these researchers were proceeding from a theory that there's no easily discernable combinatorial macroscopic structure in DNA sequences, but I think that this would stretch the idea of 'theory' beyond common usage or even usefulness: There's no theorem or axioms of DNA sequencing being violated here. In fact, I would expect that weirdness is a good sign of missing theory - a repeatable observation which is unsupported by existing theory. For perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, we see an explicit violation of Newtonian mechanics, but in many other cases (like CRISPR and palindromic subsequences) we have observations of structure in areas where theory simply does not yet exist. (Apologies for the harsh first sentence; FWIW, your comment seemed belittling of the work of a large fraction of important scientists.)

klabb3 3y ago

> Not possible. Theory comes first. I used to think this way but it’s significantly more liberating and true to see theory as plausible explanations. Theories are very often afterthoughts, where the utility is prediction of new events, or narrowing the search space of experiments. A theory explaining past events only is not really a theory at all. But you can narrow search space in many ways without elaborate theories. For instance, you may assume that since birds can fly, if we make a machine that looks similar, we might be able to fly as well. Terribly simplistic theory, but nevertheless a good starting point.

tdehnel 3y ago
Calling theories useful if they predict future events is called Instrumentalism and it’s a dead end if your goal is to understand reality. “The magician will pull a rabbit from the hat” might reliably predict what happens, and be testable, but it is not a good scientific explanation because it doesn’t help anyone understand how the trick works.

imtringued 3y ago

You are assuming that we have thought of all theories that an experiment can confirm, before conducting the experiment. Considering the large search space, that would be quite surprising.

tdehnel 3y ago
Can you tell me why a scientist would decide to do a certain experiment without a theory about what to test and why? Why that experiment and not any of infinite others?
- ajuc 3y ago
  Because he already has a sample and it doesn't hurt to check other properties of it.
  - tdehnel 3y ago
    Which properties to check? Why that sample and not countless others? Why not spend the rest of his life checking different properties of the one sample?
    - ajuc 3y ago
      Whatever suits your fancy. > Why not spend the rest of his life checking different properties of the one sample? The material in question is called LK-99 because it was first produced in 1999. Why not, indeed :) ?
- robwwilliams 3y ago
  We do this much of the time in genetics, genomics, and neuroscience. New technology; Large set of samples; Quantify x<1> … x<n> mRNAs, proteins, lipids, metabolites; Estimate how units stick together (statistically or literally); Develop a “theory” of what units and groups of units interact to account for and predict higher order phenotypes (risk of neurodegeneration; lifespan). Data take precedence. Mini-theories of molecular and cellular causality are assembled with some basic brain power and yes—-a dollop of theory and priors—-on the back of a massive pool of well structured data. Exploratory biology of this type is/was insulted using the terms “fishing” or “mere description” but with current high throughput and high content technologies should be considered research “trawling” and factory-level science; not a cottage industry of small labs. This new style of science can be highly effective in biology and in astronomy as we are learning from Webb. But it bugs the hell out of some classically trained reductionists who demand that clear hypotheses should drive science forward. Much of the progress in modern biology falls into this alternative almost hypothesis-free style. I would say “story-free” style of science. Too damn many story-tellers.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jack_riminton 3y ago

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …” — Isaac Asimov

tdehnel 3y ago
“That’s funny…” implies you had a pre existing theory about how it was supposed to work.
- overboard2 3y ago
  You don't need a preexisting theory though, you just need to lack one that explains the results of an experiment
  - tdehnel 3y ago
    Why would someone do an experiment without a theory to test? How would they know that a particular result was interesting without a theory about the expected result?
    - foodjinn 3y ago
      Because rubbing your chin doesn't accomplish anything, messing around with stuff does.
      - tdehnel 3y ago
        There are practically infinite combinations of things to mess around with. Which stuff do scientists choose to mess around with and why?
        foodjinn 3y ago
        [dead]
- SanderNL 3y ago

ajuc 3y ago

We discovered first "crystal diodes" in 1870s. There was a whole idustry doing "magic needle+crystal diodes" without understanding why they work. They just knew you had to touch a special spot on the crystal with a needle. Some spots worked better than others. It was art not science. We had the first theory on how they operate in 1920s. Eventually we got transistors from that theory in 1950s.

davidivadavid 3y ago

While correct you're being downvoted because you're equivocating on the term "theory." People are assuming you're talking about a fully baked, documented theory couched in precise language and equations. What you're actually talking about is tacit assumptions / models that are built in observations. "Theory comes first" is particularly unfortunate wording because it seems to imply the naive point of view that people first come up with a thorough mathematical model of some phenomenon before testing and validating it with experiments. That's obviously not how science has worked throughout history. Saying "all observations/measurements imply an underlying theory" would have been maybe more accurate.