Physicists (String Theorists) and Philosophers Debate the Scientific Method 383
StartsWithABang writes: One of the most damning, albeit accurate, condemnations of String Theory that has been leveled at it is that it's untestable, non-empirical, and offers no concrete predictions or methods of falsification. Yet some have attempted to address this failing not by coming up with concrete predictions or falsifiable tests, but by redefining what is meant by theory confirmation. Many physicists and philosophers have jumped into this debate, and a recently completed workshop has produced no agreements, but lots of interesting perspectives being live blogged by a physicist. Also weighing in is a philosopher in three separate parts.
Trust the philosopher (Score:4, Insightful)
When it comes to the "scientific method", you may be surprised that it's more useful and illuminating to query the philosopher than the scientist.
Re:Trust the philosopher (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, I would be incredibly surprised.
If you can't show me how to test your hypo, it's parlor talk (philosophy).
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Did you read the article?
Do NOT Trust the philosopher (Score:5, Insightful)
Gross proposed to distinguish among frameworks, theories, and models. Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and string “theory” are not theories, but rather frameworks. Theories are something like Newton’s or Einstein’s theory of gravity, or the unfortunately named Standard “Model.” Theories can be tested, frameworks not so much. Models include the BCS model of superconductivity, or BSM (Beyond Standard Model) models.
Unfortunately classical mechanics and quantum mechanics can and have been tested. Frameworks in his definition seem to be multiple applications of the same fundamental, physical principles to different situations. These can easily be tested and, for two of the examples given, have been. Then we get gems like:
According to Gross, since physical phenomena scale as the log(energy), physicists can extrapolate theory to very high energy. Unfortunately, experiments scale only as energy^2, which means that they cannot easily be extrapolated to very high energy.
which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Just off the top of my head there are the corrections to the Higgs mass which scale as energy squared (which is theory) and I've no idea what it means to say that an experiment scales with energy-squared since, for many experiments, increasing the energy is irrelevant and for others, e.g. a linear accelerator, the energy increases linearly with size.
Re:Do NOT Trust the philosopher (Score:5, Interesting)
Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and string “theory” are not theories, but rather frameworks.
This is an accurate statement. "Quantum mechanics" isn't a theory by itself. It's a framework in which to construct theories. So, for example, the Dirac theory of the electron is a theory built out of quantum mechanics. Quantum electrodynamics is a theory built out of quantum field theory, and so on.
The word "theory" in "quantum field theory" or "string theory" is more like the word "theory" in "group theory". Physicists use group theory, but group theory is not a scientific theory in the sense that hard sciences like physics use the term.
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So does it stop being a 'theory' just because other theories base themselves off of it (i.e. it is assumed the theory 'must' be true but that it hasn't been proved) or something else? If so - and this is a genuine question not a sarcasm - when do these 'frameworks' becomes 'proofs' (if you see what I mean?) or have I missed the point of something?
Think of it this way: Group theory (in mathematics) is not a scientific theory, in the sense that it does not explain anything about the natural world. However, it is a useful language in which you can express certain aspects of scientific theories.
Quantum mechanics is the same thing. It isn't a scientific theory, it is a language in which scientific theories (e.g. Dirac's theory of the electron) can be expressed.
Re:Do NOT Trust the philosopher (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and it is full of tripe like the following:
You do realize that the quotations you give have to do with a talk by David Gross [wikipedia.org], a Nobel Prize winning particle physicist, right?
The report you quote is by a philosopher who participated in the conference, but the ideas you mention in the quotation come out of a talk by a PARTICLE PHYSICIST.
You want to complain about them? Fine. Just be clear that the "tripe" you're citing came from a paper by a physicist talking about the scientific method.
Oh, and in case you want to question the credentials of the "philosopher" who is reporting on the physicist, the philosopher who wrote the blog is Massimo Piglucci [wikipedia.org], who holds THREE doctorates: a doctorate in genetics, a Ph.D. in biology, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
He's hardly an ignorant idiot who knows nothing about how "science" is done.
Re:Do NOT Trust the philosopher (Score:5, Insightful)
who holds THREE doctorates: a doctorate in genetics, a Ph.D. in biology, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
As someone who's now supervised and graduated a few PhD students, I'd say that multiple PhDs, especially in related field is kind of a minus point. A PhD is supposed to teach you how to research and how to get a grounding in the field. The third aspect is actually getting that grounding in the field. You shoudn't need two PhDs in genetics and biology. If you've done one, you ought to be able to pick up the other yourself. Otherwise, you're having someone tell you what to do twice rather than doing your own research the second time.
Sure for philosophy, it's quite different, but even so a taught masters would probably be better.
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Re:Do NOT Trust the philosopher (Score:5, Informative)
who holds THREE doctorates: a doctorate in genetics, a Ph.D. in biology, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
As someone who's now supervised and graduated a few PhD students, I'd say that multiple PhDs, especially in related field is kind of a minus point.
As someone who also has advised and has graduated doctoral students, I'd generally agree with you. Except you need to look over the whole CV in most cases to understand what's going on. This is no exception.
A PhD is supposed to teach you how to research and how to get a grounding in the field. The third aspect is actually getting that grounding in the field. You shoudn't need two PhDs in genetics and biology. If you've done one, you ought to be able to pick up the other yourself. Otherwise, you're having someone tell you what to do twice rather than doing your own research the second time.
This is all true, but this specific case is perhaps different. Note that I said the first was a "doctorate," not a Ph.D. That's because it's from Italy. There's two issues there:
(1) Terminology -- Italian "doctorates" sometimes are actually equivalent to American master's degrees, and sometimes to Ph.D.'s. I haven't looked into seeing exactly how this one would qualify, but if you just had one of the ones that would be viewed as equivalent to a U.S. master's degree, you'd want to get a "real" Ph.D. if you wanted to join academia in the U.S.
(2) Even if the Italian "doctorate" is roughly equivalent to an American Ph.D., there are various levels of rigor at Italian universities. Many American academics are a bit skeptical of Italian credentials if they aren't familiar with the specific program. If this guy wanted to get hired in American academia, it would probably be easier to do so with a Ph.D. from an American university.
Sure for philosophy, it's quite different, but even so a taught masters would probably be better.
Except if you actually want to get an academic JOB as a philosopher. Recall that besides all of your stuff about "getting grounding in the field," a Ph.D. is also a credential to get a job. If you decide mid-career that you actually want to teach/do research at an American university in a very different field, a Ph.D. is the most common expected qualification. If you don't have one in that specific field, it's harder to convince a hiring committee to consider you.
But all of this is useless theoretical consideration. My point in bringing up the credentials was not to argue that he took the most normal scientific pathway -- my guess is that he took a few turns in figuring out what he wanted to do with his career.
Rather -- I was just trying to point out that this guy is more than a "philosopher" -- he spent a couple decades doing research in science and was for over a decade was a PROFESSOR in biology, including being tenured at Stony Brook BEFORE he became a full-time "philosopher" in his positions. He's written multiple books published by places like MIT Press and University of Chicago. Look over his CV [lehman.edu], if you want more details.
We can argue about the reasons multiple Ph.D.'s are usually bad or unnecessary, but in this specific case, we're clearly talking about a VERY qualified SCIENTIST, who later changed careers and now has an academic position as a philosopher of science.
Jeez. Before bitching about somebody's credentials, take a minute and read the link to his Wikipedia bio I already had put in my previous post.
Mod parent down (Score:3, Funny)
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If you don't accept that the scientific method is a viable approach to uncovering the manner in which the universe behaves, I would ask why you don't step off the ledge at the top of a tall building. If you believe that experimentation or empirical data is unnecessary to establish the veracity of some claim I would ask why you would not purchase from me a potion for the sum of $100 that I claim will make you $10000 richer on the morrow.
Someone might be able to talk a commendable piece of
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If you don't accept that the scientific method is a viable approach to uncovering the manner in which the universe behaves
I don't think anyone is saying that the scientific method isn't a viable approach to uncover the manner in which the universe behaves. I think the implication is that the scientific method may not be the best approach to uncover the manner in which the scientific method behaves.
...I would ask why you don't step off the ledge at the top of a tall building.
This is a terrible example. The scientific method is entirely unnecessary to decide whether to step off of a tall building. People knew not do do that before the scientific method was codified. I doubt anyone has ever done a rig
Begging the question (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the implication is that the scientific method may not be the best approach to uncover the manner in which the scientific method behaves.
That is a great example of begging the question [wikipedia.org].
The scientific method is entirely unnecessary to decide whether to step off of a tall building. People knew not do do that before the scientific method was codified.
You don't have to codify the method of study to use it. People who discovered the effects of falling off tall buildings WERE using the scientific method whether or not they were aware of that fact at the time.
Re:Begging the question (Score:4, Insightful)
That is a great example of begging the question [wikipedia.org].
Again, it seems you have no idea what you're talking about. I wasn't begging the question, I was rephrasing for the benefit of someone who appears to be pointless. There's no significant argumentation happening here on either side, so we aren't even to the point where we can claim that someone's argument is bad or invalid.
You don't have to codify the method of study to use it.
The "scientific method" is precisely the codification of reasoning techniques that were in use long before. Observing something falling from a significant height, seeing it get damaged, and deciding, "I don't want that to happen to me," is not science. Science is a process involving a hypothesis, experimentation, and collection of reproducible empirical evidence. You might believe any number of rational and true things, but without engaging in some kind of experimentation or testing, those beliefs aren't science.
And that's what this whole discussion is about. People are discussing the extent to which current theoretical physics can be considered "science", since there may not be any way to directly test the models that theoretical physicists are creating.
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This is a terrible example. The scientific method is entirely unnecessary to decide whether to step off of a tall building. People knew not do do that before the scientific method was codified.
"Science" is a branch of philosophy, natural philosophy to be precise. The "scientific method" is a process. Refusing to jump off a building is common-sense, the scientific method is formalised common-sense. They are very much the same thing at a philosophical level.
As for TFA, any competent physicists/cosmologist should be able to rattle off a handful of completely different theories that predict the same result (eg: string theory and the standard model). Until such time that one of them correctly predi
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In the sense that the scientific method is more philosophical than scientific.
The scientific method was not a product of science, but rather of philosophy. Roger Bacon was a philosopher. A Franciscan monk in fact. He's the guy you can thank (at least in the West).
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Honest to God, I'm pretty surprised at how much ignorance there is about philosophy. This is where the utility of a classical education comes in. Fucking engineers. The worship of science and scientists without understanding that there is a context in which science exists. And above science is Mathematics. And just above Mathematics is Philosophy.
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You are not keeping up with the conversation here.
That the scientific method is a philosophical concept is not in dispute (and if you think it is, you're disqualified). That does not mean that philosophers are scientists, or that they should be.
Architects are not steel workers. But without architecture, steel workers could not build a bridge or skyscraper. Does that mean there
Re: Trust the philosopher (Score:4, Insightful)
The most shameful part is how many philosophers never even made it to the first tier of science, much less mathematics or higher.
Did you even bother to look at who the "philosophers" are at this conference?
Go ahead -- look at the bios of the speakers [uni-muenchen.de]. Visit their websites. Check their CVs and credentials.
You'll find that many of the "philosophers" here hold a bachelor's and/or a master's degree in physics. Those who don't tend to have master's degrees or Ph.D.'s in some other area of science... generally in addition to a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
You can complain about the scientific ignorance of some philosophers. But those weren't the people at this conference.
Re: Trust the philosopher (Score:5, Insightful)
Thankfully the mathematicians and statisticians stepped in and made the philosophy robust. Sure, maybe you're a Bayesian and believe you can use Solomonoff Induction to judge purely theoretical hypotheses; good for you,but that's still strictly in the land of math and stats.
Oy - that's not the point.
The scientific method is exactly a philosophy. You gotta start somewhere. Intelligent design is a philosophy, so is creationism.
The philosophy of the scientific method demands the possibility of falsification, that experiments can be performed in order to prove or disprove a theory - and please please don't interpret hypothesis or wild assed guess as theory. The philosopies of creationism annd ID do not.
I do know the stringy guys have been bitching because their hypotheses are not testable, but if the debate to allow non-testable ideas into the philosophy of the scientific method, it will be a problem. That means that "God did it," is equally as valid as any proveable aspect of the universe we live in. We cannot prove God did or didn't, so in a falsifiable is optional philosophy, all bets are both on and off. Gravity might not exist - it might be the gentle hand of God on everyone's shoulders steadying us as we go through life. Prove that what I just wrote is wrong.
Though I'll finally be able to force schools to teach the controversey between the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Quicky, the Flying Skink lizard.
Re: Trust the philosopher (Score:2)
Yeah, let's trust ethics and morals on priests and ulemas, where they belong.
What a waste of time, philosophy...
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Yet another HHGTTG moment, when Deepthought is told the philosophers threaten go on strike, he replied
"Whom would that effect?"
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We know the scientific method is valid because we have empirical evidence that says it works! /sarcasm
Well... we have light bulbs.
How many years before the industrial revolution did the Catholic Church have to come up with revealed knowledge that would enable them to create working light bulbs? How long following the industrial revolution and wide adoption of the scientific method did it take someone to come up with working light bulbs?
So yeah... light bulbs.
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Re:Trust the philosopher (Score:4, Interesting)
A poor example. The Catholic Church was never in the business of exploration or investigation. It got involved in science as far as it did because it had some political and social implications. Not to mention that science and every other pursuit would be subordinated to the revelation of God.
Of course, as other people pointed out, the scientific method, in the West, was in large part was pioneered by Catholic clerics. So, perhaps the answer to your question is that it took approximately 1,875 years for the Catholic Church to invent the light bulb. And 1,945 years to invent the Atomic Bomb.
Or perhaps comparing a serious philosopher interested in science to the meddling of the Catholic hierarchy is silly. Religion may contain philosophy, but philosophy is not confined to religion.
And you could certainly invent light bulbs even if you had an imperfect, even fallacious understanding of electricity. All you have to do is manage to replicate the rules allowing a light bulb to work, often through brute force observation and trial and error. Your backing theory doesn't have to be right if you blunder into the correct implementation.
Anyway, science clearly has legitimacy because it does manage to produce things. That much is true.
However, the investigation of science has gone far beyond what we could experiment on directly with the energies available to us. So, for that reason the string theorists and philosophers may have a point.
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So, for that reason the string theorists and philosophers may have a point.
As soon as you go past a point at which your story is falsifiable through any conceivable experiment, it's just a story: it's no longer a scientific theory. Theories must be falsifiable, or they are invalid.
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As soon as you go past a point at which your story is falsifiable through any conceivable experiment, it's just a story: it's no longer a scientific theory. Theories must be falsifiable, or they are invalid.
That's the slashdot version, and thankfully, reality is a bit different. Parts of quantum mechanics wasn't thought to be falsifiable until some 40 years after the theory arrived, and then 20 more years before attempts to do so could be made. It worked, explained previous problems, and there were no alternative theories that would fit the data. Einstein had hoped we would find other explanations, but even he acknowledged it as a theory.
It is more correct to say that a theory either has to be falsifiable,
Jeering From the Sidelines (Score:3)
While the philosophers have a point, it is highly unlikely any breakthroughs in fundamental science will be made by someone educated purely in academic philosophy.
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While the philosophers have a point, it is highly unlikely any breakthroughs in fundamental science will be made by someone educated purely in academic philosophy.
Let me ask a question - maybe this can help. Could a philosopher come up with the scientific method?
All philosophies are not the same, and philosophers did come up with the scientific method.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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No-one is disagreeing about the origins of the scientific method. Did you think that it somehow refutes the point of mine that you quoted?
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I have addressed your architects claim elsewhere: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
Philosophers did indeed get science going, but there is a great deal of coattail-riding in suggesting that current science is dependent on, or a consequence of, current academic philosophy.
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That's not at all what I said. It's not "science" that's necessarily dependent on philosophy (although it is, of course), but the "scientific method" that is entirely dependent on philosophy (neither of those is "scare quotes", by the way). I hope you can see the distinction.
I bet if you had studied philosophy, you would most definitely see the distinction.
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Bull. Metallurgy was practiced a very, very long time ago. Hit and miss, see what works. Try the last guy's formulas for making various bronzes. Note that last one.
Same goes for the bow before that. It most certainly wasn't philosophers that thought up composite bows or recurves.
And napping flint before that.
You're confusing when things were written down with their origins. They just called it survival back then.
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Do you know what "scientific method" means? Do you think it means "hit and miss, see what works"?
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I, a mathematician, shall wax philosophical for you. (I'm already burning karma, probably. I've got more.)
At any rate...
Sometimes, it is those that know the least speak the loudest. It is often the least educated that proselytizes the most. Quite often, it is the uneducated and poor who zealously die first in battle.
There are, of course, exceptions as there are to most things. If one were to make a universal truth from this then it might simply be that people are people.
This, of course, ties in with a state
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"but the "scientific method" that is entirely dependent on philosophy"
Exactly the opposite is true: Newton, or Einstein for that matter, developed their theories giving a damn on pesky philosophers. In this regard, epistemology was alike naturalists: they don't invent butterflies but catalogue them, and it is naturalists the ones dependant on butterflies, not the other way around.
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Then you jump on the coattails in your next sentence! You have also been straining mightily to imply it in the rest of your posts here, falling back on an undisputed but narrow factual claim when pressed - a near-perfect example of the Motte and Bailey fallacy. Your frequent invocation of the origins of the scientific method only underscores by contrast how little a role contemporary academic philosophy played through the scientific revolution - as I said in my reply to your '
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"Science existed before Philosophy. Science is learning."
Only if you game "science" to mean what you want to mean.
"Science is learning."
That's exactly what I mean. Do you know what the ethymology of the word "philosophy" is? It comes from the Greek "philos sophia" which means "knowledge's friend". It is philosophy which is learning, not science. What ancient Greeks did was not science, it was philosophy. And because what they did was philosophy, not science, they put in the same ground the guy that sai
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Re:Trust the philosopher (Score:4, Insightful)
If the philosopher you ask is Roger Bacon (who advanced the scientific method), then you would definitely be also asking a theologian.
I can't believe how bloody-minded some people are.
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I can't believe how bloody-minded some people are.
Aren't there philosophies explaining that?
Both the bloody-mindedness and your disbelief.
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To my mind, my degree is in Applied Mathematics, and to the minds of many others - the highest order of mathematician is, indeed, the Philosopher of Mathematics. They carry that name for a reason and one might say that mathematics is the highest order. There are still a few Philosophers of Mathematics kicking around. In fact, I started reading a paper from one not too long ago and, true to form, I stopped not long after the abstract and fell asleep. For the life of me, I've no idea what it was about and I d
Re:Trust the philosopher, my foot! (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's a construction worker's profession to implement an architect's design, but I wouldn't ask a construction worker to design my skyscraper.
The scientific method is a philosophical construct more than a scientific one.
Re:Trust the philosopher, my foot! (Score:4, Insightful)
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy. Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history. It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
Re:Trust the philosopher, my foot! (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think it's a dick-measuring contest?
Science is about the testable. Math (and logic) is about the provable. Philosophy is about the more fundamental questions.
You may say "I know X to be true". That raises 3 fundamental questions without easy answers:
* What does "I" mean - Theory of Identity
* What does "know" mean - Theory of Knowledge (epistemology)
* What does "true" mean - Meta-Logic
Science is certainly practical. Philosophy rarely is. But philosophy does highlight how little we really know, despite our ever-growing skill at the practical. And it's worth remembering that every field of science started as philosophy, and only with the tools and the mindset did it eventually become practical, become science.
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Do you think it's a dick-measuring contest?
Don't attribute your misunderstanding of the issue to me (I am guessing that you have misunderstood it because your examples are not relevant to the relationship between the scientific method and philosophy, but instead look like an attempt to claim an extra couple of mm for philosophy.)
As for ignorance, humanity had no idea of how much it did not know until science got going.
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I hereby award "Science" the Awesome Trophy for being the most awesomest awesome that ever awesomed. Are you satisfied?
But is the scientific method a tool to discover what is true? Is truth the same as "ever more accurate and predictive models"? It's not a scientific question.
As for ignorance, humanity had no idea of how much it did not know until science got going.
Socrates once said that the only wisdom he had was in understanding how little he knew. What do you say today? How much do we not know ? How could you even answer such a question? It's not a scientific question.
No, yes, and I think you missed the obvious. (Score:4, Interesting)
But is the scientific method a tool to discover what is true? Is truth the same as "ever more accurate and predictive models"? It's not a scientific question
No, that is correct. The scientific method is a method of determining if something is possibly true, and then rate the truthfulness. For example, we can use the scientific method and analyze the evolution of species and conclude that it's "probably" true. We have not witnessed it so have no "proof", but the evidence we have seems to indicate that it's not only possible but probable. The more evidence we have, the more accurate the scientific method becomes.
Socrates once said that the only wisdom he had was in understanding how little he knew.
A bit simple, but works. He actually said that the Oracle of Delphi told him he was the wisest person in the world, and that the gods tasked him to find someone wiser (which he never could).
What do you say today? How much do we not know ? How could you even answer such a question? It's not a scientific question.
At great risk to my Karma I'll point out that Science has become a Religion. As a several decades long student of Philosophy, I find that many people claiming to be scientific and atheists trust certain scientific theories just like a holy book. You have your evangelists attempting to convert believers in other faiths to their ways of thinking, and even have the zealots trying to make other Religions illegal.
Given that some questions are only Philosophical, such as the beginning of the Universe, you get similar answers to a formal Theology. "Philosophy" is taught to be a dirty word to the "science" religion, they can be as impossible to debate as any theological believer.
Re:No, yes, and I think you missed the obvious. (Score:5, Interesting)
Meh, I'll burn some karma with you.
Science is very much a belief system. I find it a bit disconcerting that people will claim they're logical and reasoned and, if you ask the best of them, they'll tell you how they believe science. When you point out that science is, quite literally, openly admitting that it's "best guess" and probably always will be (in certain areas) and that it is illogical to believe that it is the truth they get feisty.
Of course this doesn't mean you should take something else on faith. But there's a huge difference between what we believe to be true and what is true which can be followed to all sorts of absurd conclusions. It's a hierarchal faith based belief system complete with dogma, dictation of values, proselytizing, shunning, and a greater power.
We just don't like to admit it. It's no more logical to place complete faith in it than it is to place complete faith in Jesus though we'll try to spin it that way in our heads - just like God-botherers. Of course, science has tangible benefits but we can, literally, claim everything is from science. That hammer? Yup, a product of science.
I'm far more likely to rely on science than I am a deity but that's because I understand it and I know it's an imperfect model and I do not believe it to be infallible. I do like the odds better with science than with Jesus but I've actually found the God-botherers to be a little less pushy in many areas.
(I'm pretty sure I can piss off both sides at once. What's karma if you can't burn it?)
Re:No, yes, and I think you missed the obvious. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are methods like experiments and also methods like trying to logically compare an idea to things already known. In the end, any idea you throw Science at gets evaluated, and that's the point where some people might think that it has something to do with a belief, the belief that any idea should be evaluated by Science in general, and that the evaluation results are valid and in some way important to us.
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I wouldn't say "more accurate" is the same as "more likely to be true". What is an electron, really? It was once the common scientific belief that an electron has position. Now it's a better model to say that position has electron-ness. It's certainly a better model, but I don't think it's any closer to what an electron is, really. Model improve, and old models remain as accurate as they ever were, but as "truth", each fails to be replaced by another, and I doubt that will ever stop.
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I have bad news for you: you will not find *the* Truth in philosophy either, though you may find a number of different definitions of the word.
It turns out that knowledge is a pretty good alternative.
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Oh, I'm asking about the scientific method here. Is it possible to discover truth using it? Is that an interesting question? I think it's interesting. Bit of a philosophical question, though, isn't it?
You say "knowledge" is a pretty good alternative to "truth"? But most people would agree that truth is a prerequisite for knowledge, that to know a thing you must believe it, it must be true, and you must be justified in your belief. If you want to claim that the scientific method can lead to knowledge wi
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I hereby award "Science" the Awesome Trophy for being the most awesomest awesome that ever awesomed. Are you satisfied?
But is the scientific method a tool to discover what is true? Is truth the same as "ever more accurate and predictive models"? It's not a scientific question.
Unless you are prepared to define "truth", your argument is horseshit. The concepts of true and false have rather specific meanings within scientific context. "Truth", especially within the context of philosophy, is (usually) something quite different. The "method", or more precisely, methods (plural) of philosophy are ad hoc. Scientific method is anything but that.
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Science is certainly practical. Philosophy rarely is
In fairness, many fields of science started out as philosophy.
As an easy example of the practical results of philosophy, we can point to our democratic systems (Utopia [wikipedia.org] by Sir Thomas More is my favorite example of political philosophy).
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There is such a thing as obsolescence of human ideas IMHO.
Sure, when we know all there is to know about the physical world, and there's nothing left to learn, science will be obsolete. When we know all there is to know about the abstract world, and there's nothing left to learn, philosophy will be obsolete - but I rather suspect that will come later.
One good example is "ethics", which stubbornly remains a philosophical field, seeming immune to either mathematical proof from first principles (except for those of some strong faith), or to empirical measurement. Wi
Re:Trust the philosopher, my foot! (Score:4, Informative)
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy. Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history. It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
And I will add that the most influential recent philosopher on the practice of science was a physicist himself: Percy Bridgman [wikipedia.org]. In this landmark work The Logic of Modern Physics [wikipedia.org] Bridgman clarified ideas about what it means to observe or measure something [wikipedia.org].
Re:Trust the philosopher, my foot! (Score:5, Insightful)
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy.
Actually, more accurately, science -- since about 1950 -- tends to ignore a lot of the interesting insights that philosophy of science tends to offer. Hence your citation of a guy who died decades ago, rather than a lot of the stuff that has happened since.
Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history.
A few things here:
If Popper's ideas weren't very interesting or innovative, why does his idea of falsificationism get cited on Slashdot as the foundation of science all the time? How precisely do you think scientists formulated this idea before Popper? Answer -- they didn't. If you look at how science was practiced in the late 1800s, you'll see a lot more haphazard theorizing, the nature of mathematical models and statistics in relation to causality and significance was less formalized, and while people spoke in terms of "hypotheses" and "theories," it wasn't discussed in the way people on Slashdot talk about it today.
Popper's falsificationism developed out of a philosophical movement called logical positivism [wikipedia.org], which had tremendous influence on lots of people in the first half of the 20th century who were looking into the nature of the foundations of mathematics and science, the nature of "proof," etc. Stuff like Godel's incompleteness theorem came out of this.
But the scientific outlook was fundamentally changed as the nature of causality and explanation was invoked, rather than simple description.
With this heavier empirical burden, people like Popper criticized some of these concepts while offering new ideas about formulating hypotheses. If you think scientists just "intuited" the idea of falsifiability before Popper, you obviously haven't read a lot of science writing in the generations before him. Yes, some scientists were basically doing falsificationism, but Popper formalized the idea, and thus it caught on as a standard way of considering the validity of empirical methodology.
Of course, the naive view of falsificationism as usually presented by people on Slashdot isn't actually how science works, and Popper recognized this [wikipedia.org]. He didn't believe that's how science advanced -- his theories were actually quite complex [wikipedia.org]. And others followed in critiquing and coming up with new ways that more accurately reflects how science actually advances -- you get various perspectives from people like Kuhn [wikipedia.org], Lakatos [wikipedia.org], and even the wacky Feyerabend [wikipedia.org]. And now we're only up to 1970 or so. Philosophers of science have had a lot more interesting things to say in the past 45 years too.
It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
And you may say, "But it's philosophy! Who cares?!"
The thing is -- science doesn't actually work according to the oversimplified "scientific method" or according to pseudo-Popperian naive falsificationism. It's a lot more complicated, and it has a lot of methodological flaws. Philosophers of science identified many of these in the 1950s through 1970s, but scientists by then had stopped reading philosophy journals. Instead, this naive empiricism led to all sorts of abuses and missteps (see medical studies of the mid-20th century for lots of interesting examples).
But there's more. For the past few decades (beginning seriou
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And it's a construction worker's profession to implement an architect's design, but I wouldn't ask a construction worker to design my skyscraper.
The scientific method is a philosophical construct more than a scientific one.
I am not sure I would, generally, agree with scientific method being a philosophical construct before a scientific one, based on the reference.com dictionary definition of "Scientific Method":
"a method of research in which a problem is identified, relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formulated from these data, and the hypothesis is empirically tested."
The philosopher will sit back and think about things, possibly describing a problem in a form that can be addressed by someone other than another philosopher. But the scientist will define the bounds of the problem as (generally) measurable features, gather data and formulate hypotheses, leading to the empirical testin
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Philosophy is not the scientific method, but philosophy is where the scientific method comes from.
A=B does not mean A=C.
This discussion is a very clear example of why people should not be able to get a college degree with out taking a few years of philosophy.
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You had to drop Philosophy 101 because you couldn't understand a goddamn thing, right? Be honest.
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You had to drop Philosophy 101 because you couldn't understand a goddamn thing, right? Be honest.
I taught (briefly) parts of a final-year philosophy class. It's very hard to get people to understand that philosophy is about logic.
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And yet, all those statements are true.
String Theorists Are Not Physicists (Score:5, Funny)
String theorists are not physicists. They are mathturbators, at best.
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I would also add "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are the aether of the 21st century.
Re:String Theorists Are Not Physicists (Score:5, Insightful)
I would also add "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are the aether of the 21st century.
Dark matter is a highly scientific and technical term that means "We don't know"
Seriously.
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More like, "we don't know", but we have to make some shit up or everything else we believe will fall apart.
It's a place holder since we probably won't ever know everything, we sometimse have to use a place holder instead of giving up.
Re:String Theorists Are Not Physicists (Score:5, Insightful)
You are correct! No matter what it is that is causing the observed effects that is *dark matter.* There are many competing theories as to what dark matter is, some of them are outlandish. However, even if it turns out that the effects observed are caused by purple unicorn farts, the purple unicorn farts are dark matter.
I had an excellent conversation with a Slashdotter about this, just a few days ago, and I've concluded that I hate the name as much as I hate The God Particle. I can think of no other reason why people are so unwilling to understand. It's really quite simple. It is simple enough for *me* to understand it. Something is causing an effect. No matter what that is, whatever it turns out to be that is causing that effect, it is dark matter.
I know, I was even given some sort-of-thanks, that I explained this quite clearly in the thread that was active just this week. I even explained it multiple times and had some great replies and a good time was had by all. In that thread, I postulated that I'd need to repeat the same damned thing in this thread. Nobody ever listens to a KGIII. *sighs*
But, well, at least you get it, I don't know why the rest don't. However, I make this post to point out that I'd not thought about the term "place holder." I'm stealing that. I'm going to tweak it a little. We call it Dark Matter, as a place holder, because that lorem ipsum whateverum is just too damned long to type and memorize. Seriously, how is this a contentious matter? Now, the various theories as to what is causing the effect are straight up stupid (some of them) but that's immaterial.
I don't think that they thought it through very well when they decided to use this as a name. I can understand why some people are confused. I can't understand why they stay that way.
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I would have called it "weird fucking shit", but then I'm not a physicist. In fact that could be why I'm not a physicist.
That is what it is often called
In the bar, after the conference.
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Re:String Theorists Are Not Physicists (Score:4, Insightful)
I would also add "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are the aether of the 21st century.
This is actually quite true, not sure why someone modded you "flaimbait". Must be someone that doesn't understand that subject matter.
Dark Matter has never been directly observed, neither has Dark Energy. They are just suppositions that according to our current understanding, something must be there. This is in the same league as Aether - it was thought at the time that you needed a medium to transmit any sort of information, like sound waves.
I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something.
The observational support for Dark Matter is staggering. There is simply not enough matter of any of the types that we have in the Standard Model to explain the directly observable effect of gravity in the Universe. Dark Matter out-masses all of the types of matter we understand by 5-to-1 in the Universe; and right here at home, in our local galaxy, the Milky Way, it out-masses all conventional forms of matter 20-to-1. We can easily detect its gravitational influence, and produce maps of its distribution. Only if you believe that nothing can be "directly observed" from its gravity (as if it were "less real" than light, say) could your claim be defended.
The discovery of cosmic acceleration similarly is direct observational evidence of the existence of Dark Energy.
These two physical realities are so different from the hypothesized "ether" of pre-modern physics that it is clear you do not understand any of this.
Re:String Theorists Are Not Physicists (Score:5, Interesting)
"I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something."
Or is it you?
"The observational support for Dark Matter is staggering. "
As it was the case for Aether before 1905.
"There is simply not enough matter of any of the types that we have in the Standard Model to explain the directly observable effect of gravity"
As there were nothing to explain i.e. Michelson-Morley experiment but an inelastic aether compressing everything as it speeds up.
"Dark Matter out-masses all of the types of matter we understand"
Aether compresses all the types of matter we know too. Yes, just like Dark Matter has its oddities, like being able to penetrate all solids (but we know "solids" are basically vacuum with small "grains" of atoms here and there, so no problem) or not producing trails when a solid mass travels through it but, how else could you explain that light's speed doesn't change despite the emiting object's speed!?
"The discovery of cosmic acceleration similarly is direct observational evidence of the existence of Dark Energy."
The discovery of the speed of light being the same in the Earth's axis of movement around the Sun and perpendicular to it, is also observational evidence of the existence of Aether. You can ask Ernst Match if you don't believe me.
Of course, by 1905 came some Einstein telling us a different story, you know.
"These two physical realities are so different from the hypothesized "ether" of pre-modern physics that it is clear you do not understand any of this."
Or maybe it's you the one that ignore the real history behind aether, that doesn't understand the real current state of modern cosmology or the really brilliant minds of the likes of Match, Poincaré or Lorentz before Einstein.
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"I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something."
Or is it you?
No, it is you.
Dark Energy is an observed phenomenon for which we have no explanation. Aether was an explanation proposed for an observed phenomenon. In the first case, we observed that the universe is expanding and that the expansion is accelerating. We can even calculate ho much energy would be needed to cause such an acceleration. But because we don't know anything else about it, we call it "dark" energy. In the second case, we have observed that electromagnetic radiation behaves like waves (interference
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There is no dark matter; all the missing mass has been swallowed up by black holes.
If you think that, I suggest reading this recent book [amazon.com], which suggests that not only does dark matter exist, but also there's a large disk of it in one sector of our galaxy, which the earth passes through every 30-60million years. The gravitational force causes some asteroids/comets to be knocked out of the Oort cloud, which sometimes hit earth, causing a mass extinction.
I have not the knowledge to evaluate the hypothesis, but the author is a well-respected physicist, and the hypothesis is intriguing.
Re: String Theorists Are Not Physicists (Score:2)
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Re:String Theorists Are Not Physicists (Score:4)
Of course, there is a place in the world for metaphysicists, but let's be honest: if something isn't testable, it isn't science.
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What temperature is it right there? Where? Too late.
"We measured it at 38 degrees, sir"
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And what nonscientific means would you have for defining temperature, let alone measuring it?
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Would you rather them muck up real science instead?
When Einstein worked with pretty much just math to predict a bunch of stuff, that was science. Gravitational waves still haven't been detected, so is that just hogwash until empiricism confirms it?
One of the basic needs of string theory seems to be the graviton, which is funda
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They didn't complicate the math unnecessarily. In fact at first string theory was pretty simple and elegant. The math became complicated by necessity. As time went on, each new 'solution' opened up a hundred new problems, with more and more math piled on in an attempt to fix those problems. Each time string theory seemed to be coming close to reaching the answer, there was a several-years-long flurry of activity with optimistic predictions that the "theory of everything" was near at hand, only for people to
Why you should read absolutely read the article (Score:5, Funny)
This method is used during the development of a theory and is based on collecting indications which increase the physicists’ confidence that a theory describes nature. These indications are, for example, the amount (or absence of) alternative solutions to a problem, the degree by which a theory is connected to already confirmed theories, and the amount of unexpected insights that the theories give rise to.
However, the reason you should read the article is because it manages to reasonably work this image into the discussion [forbes.com].
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1. Anything that breaks causality is false.
This is really an assumption though, we don't know that it's true.
People don't understand the scientific method (Score:2, Insightful)
The scientific method requires that a hypothesis make definite predictions that can, in principle, be tested and falsified. As long as there are definite predictions that can be falsified, it's a valid hypothesis. Whether we have the ability to test that hypothesis at the present time or near future isn't relevant to its validity as a hypothesis. There are plenty of hypotheses that couldn't be tested when they were developed but have later been tested and are very useful to us today. General relativity was
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All well and good (well, you don't understand the difference between theories and hypothesis but that's a minor flaw that doesn't impact the general outcome), except for one thing: what you call "scientific method" is not *the* scientific method but "popper's scientific method". The point here is if other things can be added to it that add positive value to the construction of Science.
And that point is trivial to demonstrate by Gedankenexperiment: just imagine you have two disconnected theories each of whi
On The Other Hand... (Score:2)
While I am a dyed in the wool empiricist, and firmly believe in the fundamental importance of understanding the Universe in terms of what we can observe about it... the Universe does not give us any guarantees that a correct mathematical model of its structure necessarily must produce specific observable confirmation.
Or, perhaps observable confirmations are possible in principle but will never be observable in practice. For example, any experimental confirmation that requires direct manipulation of a super
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The Universe might behave according to string theory. But in the absence of empirical data, is string theory worth discussing?
Other views (Score:5, Interesting)
Massimo Pigliucci did a very nice blog of the Conference, with separate posts for day 1 [wordpress.com], 2 [wordpress.com] and 3 [wordpress.com].
There is also Joseph Polchinski's String theory to the rescue [arxiv.org] paper, which has a ridiculously bad probabilistic argument in Section 3. (Peter Woit thought it was a joke, but apparently not.)
For myself, I favor loop quantum gravity, which as far as I can tell wasn't represented at the conference at all.
Feyerabend (Score:2)
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String theory isn't a theory at all. Maybe I'm too much of a stickler about terminology, but I think it matters here. Calling something a theory implies two things:
1) There is a model of something in the universe, which makes definite predictions that can, in principle, be tested and falsified.
2) Experiments have been conducted and the observations support the definite predictions that are made.
If the first condition is met, it's a hypothesis. If both the first and second conditions are met, we call it a th
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"The holographic principle springs from the theory of black holes..." -- Same summary, three sentences later.
The holographic principle springs from considerations of an Anti-de Sitter Space (ADS). (If you are interested, search on "AdS/CFT correspondence".) The thing that rarely gets mentioned in those articles that observations show conclusively that we do not live in an anti-de Sitter space.
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If String Theory makes no testable predictions, then why was I just reading this, over at AAAS [sciencemag.org]? FTA:
Working with a few lasers and mirrors, physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, have been trying to test a wild idea from string theory: that our universe may be like an enormous hologram.
Maybe because that experiment has nothing to do with any theory [blogspot.com] at all.
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"The Japanese have a process called Kaizen - which is code for incremental improvement."
The Japanese also have a process called Kaikaku - which is code for breakthrough improvement.
"Herein lies the fundamental flaw with the scientific method in use today. It quite literally prevents major breakthroughs"
Only it is the same scientific method the one that makes the kaizen of refining a wel.-stablished theory and the kaikaku of going from Newton to Einstein.