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Initial Tests Fail To Find Gravitational Waves
eldavojohn writes that though gravitational waves are "predicted to exist by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, the initial tests run by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Scientific Collaboration (LIGO) failed to find anything. It doesn't disprove their existence although it does rule out a subset of string theory. From the article, 'For example, some models predict the existence of cosmic strings, which are loops in space-time that may have formed in the early universe and gotten stretched to large scales along with the expansion of the universe. These objects are thought to produce bursts of gravitational waves as they oscillate. Since no large-amplitude gravitational waves were found, cosmic strings, if they exist at all, must be smaller than some models predict.' The scientists working in Washington and Louisiana (in tandem to rule out flukes) will now move on to Advanced LIGO which will analyze a volume of space 1,000 times larger. If they don't find any gravitational waves in that experiment, the results will be more than unsettling to many theorists."
That's how science works, yeah.
An experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.
There are still degrees of success.
I tend to consider it a failure if all I learned is: "I should wear fireproof clothes for all my pyrotechnical flamabilities experiments.
Especially after the third time I learn the same lesson.
More like a cycle... observe, theorise, observe to check results, refine theory.
In this case, this is exactly what's happened - the observations looks like they may not fit the theory perfectly - hence, once that's been double-checked, go back and revise the theory and try to find out why.
If you don't test the theory, it's worthless. And if you posit a theory, only observation will definitively "prove" it. Science is about positing theories, observing results, and if they fit the theory - WONDERFUL... you just "predicted" part of the universe that nobody has before.
Intelligent Design has theories? What, if anything, does it predict?
That is actually the wrong criticism of ID. ID can certainly predict things. If the 'designers' are a bunch of bored aliens that like to do anal probes, you could predict that the aliens will cause changes in animals DNA such that they tend towards having ass holes. If the FSM is the designer, than you will predict that creatures will be designed towards higher spaghetti creating lifeforms. If the designer is an all powerful omnipotent god that thinks beetles totally kick ass, you will predict that there will be a crap ton of beetles (which there in fact are).
And hey, all of the above might very well be true.
If someone wants to go out and try and prove it, more power to them. The issue is that ID is nothing more than an attempt by religious nuts to try and teach about baby Jesus in the schools. If there were people that were taking the 'study' of ID seriously, they would sit around designing experiments to catch whatever the mysterious force is that manipulates DNA to force evolution and create their spiffy designed universe. Further, when they pondered what the force was, they would have to constrain themselves to theories based upon real physics. This would handily rule out 'magic' and 'god juice'. If they want to show that the force is god juice, they then need to go ahead and reinvent physics to try and explain how the force of god juice works. At no point does 'magic', 'just cause', or 'humans can't understand because they are not Jesus' acceptable.
The issue with ID is that science doesn't accept 'magic' as an answer. If you say a designer is forcing evolution, you need to go and figure out the force being used, and it either needs to conform to current theories or you need to find new ones that explain all observable events. This is what makes the ID folks nothing more than religious whack jobs. When Darwin declare that natural selection was the answer, people went to work figuring out how natural selection works and didn't just decide it was a magical force that just happens. They tore it apart by from a macroscopic level that studied how animals compete and co-opt, they tore it apart on the biological level understanding how cells reproduces, and they keep on drilling down until they are looking at atoms and figuring out how quantum affects influence evolution. At no point was anyone ever satisfied with 'magic' as the answer.
Here you have just given away that you start with the philosophical assumption of naturalism: that is, everything that is (or everything that affects the universe) happens inside the universe. There is not, cannot be, any supernatural. That's not a proof you have, it's an assumption that you start with. And that's fine, we all make assumptions (e.g., logic works), but it's better if you're honest about it.
Let's try an analogy. Computers operate by rules, right? Everything in the computer can be defined by the state of its memory, registers, and disk (toss in whatever extra motherboard or micro-architectural state you want). How it transitions from one state to another depends only on what the state before it was, and any inputs into the system. The vast majority of those state transitions are 100% deterministic. (I know, I did my PhD thesis on this stuff.) Only a relatively small amount of input when you boot up determines whether you're playing Quake with friends or writing posts on Slashdot. In fact, for a running system overall, the less input needed to make the whole run smoothly the better designed it was.
Now, suppose there were a self-aware program living in your computer, looking at the state of the system, and trying to determine if there were such things as these mysterious "users", and if so, how they affected the state of the system. All you know is "data"; you can't see the physical world. Since these mysterious "users" don't live in data, to you they're essentially super-natural. Now ask your question: How is it that these "users" affect data?
If you do, you'll see that in this case "magic" (meaning, "something not described in the rules of the system") is an acceptable answer; in fact, "magic" is by definition the only answer. Users create the input from the keyboard, mouse, network, &c that feed into the system. Users really can decide which processes live and die; but what does that look like to a program? Some random data came in on a certain line which fed into a program, which when certain data hits inside a certain area on the screen (the "X" button on the upper right-hand-side of a window), the program sends a signal to another program which sends a signal to another program which tells it to exit. An atheist program might say those inputs were random, like states in quantum physics. Furthermore, really technical humans may have even more control: They can use in-circuit-emulators to directly change state on the CPU and use PCI bus devices hidden from the cpu to directly read and write memory. They can rewrite the register after an ADD instruction to make it look like it added 2 and 2 and got 5.
People who believe in the Judeo-Christian God believes that God has that kind of access to the universe. If he can feed 5000 people from five loaves of bread and 2 fishes, turn water into wine, and come back from the dead, surely he can twiddle some DNA at key points in history. By definition, a "miracle" is a temporary suspension or contravention of the normal laws of the universe. And thus, by definition, the "force being used" may not be detectable or describable under the laws of physics, any more than changes a programmer makes using an in-circuit-emulator would be detectable or describable by a program inside the computer trying to determine if the universe consisted only of data, or if there was a "supernatural" outside of the data.
Note that my point is not to defend any particular ID theories or people who promote them. I have a lot of biologist friends who are Christians, and think that the evidence pretty clearly supports the current scientific understanding of the development of life here on Earth. Believing that God can intervene in the natural world doesn't mean that you can't believe in and shouldn't look for natural laws and natural explanations for things. But your logic of "ID is bad because it will accept a supernatural explanation (i.e., magic)" isn't sound.
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Science studies that which is not "magic". A supernatural explanation may be true and it would still not be science. This is a necessary limit of science.
However, even if the answer is "God did it", if God chooses to do things according to some set of rules (as most religions would have us believe), then those rules should be apparant from the patterns observable in the universe, and science should be able to deduce those rules.
That is the point of science: to observe the patterns than events in our universe follow, and produce a set of rules -- a predictive model -- that explain those patterns. This approach only fails if there are effects in our observable universe with an arbitrary or random cause outside of it. Only a God who actually behaved in an arbitrary and random way would affect the predictive success of scientific models.
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