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Cornell Team Says It's Unified the Structure of Scientific Theories
An anonymous reader writes "Cornell physicists say they've codified why science works, or more specifically, why scientific theories work – a meta-theory. Publishing online in the journal Science (abstract), the team has developed a unified computational framework they say exposes the hidden hierarchy of scientific theories by quantifying the degree to which predictions – like how a particular cellular mechanism might work under certain conditions, or how sound travels through space – depend on the detailed variables of a model."
42
What I want to know is the science behind how this new theory works. Have they done any research into that?
...are by definition metaphysics.
So perhaps this belongs in a philosophy journal, not a scientific one?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
in the paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6738
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I predict hardly anybody will give a shit
I propose for future theories we slice aways these so called "sloppy" details and focus on the the "stiff" details. We should only bother including additional details if they prove sufficiently "stiff" by adding explanatory power.
--Ockham
specifically the sixth problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_sixth_problem
And I'm VERY skeptical that they solved that problem. They should be able to solve all of the outstanding problems in mathematics then, specifically the Millennium Prize problems. They should either be able to give an answer if those problems are decidable, or prove that they are undecidable.
The abstract is a heck of a lot more clear than the description posted:
"We report a similarity between the microscopic parameter dependance of emergent theories in physics and that of multiparameter models common in other areas of science. In both cases, predictions are possible despite large uncertainties in the microscopic parameters because these details are compressed into just a few governing parameters that are sufficient to describe relevant observables. We make this commonality explicit by examining parameter sensitivity in a hopping model of diffusion and a generalized Ising model of ferromagnetism. We trace the emergence of a smaller effective model to the development of a hierarchy of parameter importance quantified by the eigenvalues of the Fisher Information Matrix. Strikingly, the same hierarchy appears ubiquitously in models taken from diverse areas of science. We conclude that the emergence of effective continuum and universal theories in physics is due to the same parameter space hierarchy that underlies predictive modeling in other areas of science."
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Ph.D == Doctor of Philosophy; which is exactly what this article sounds like to me.
Oh brother!
Scientists learn to fellate themselves. Our call for a quote was not immediately returned.
Can someone explain this with a car analogy?
Sound travels in a medium not empty space.
Damn! That article might be centrally relevant to my research right now, but I can't tell from the abstract (it might also be an unrelated specific corner of physics).
It's behind a paywall, they want money just to find out.
Can anyone find a free copy that we can examine?
(I'm wondering how useful it is to post news articles about papers that the public can't read. We could, as a group [i.e. - Slashdot], help promote open science by not publicizing closed-source articles.)
Meatphysics
I can think of nothing brasher
Than a thick and hearty rasher
With which, and some gusto, to break fast
Along with egg so sunny
Side up, a little runny
Oh, would these magic moments ever last!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum
There is so much redundancy in the universe. It looks chaotic to us, but I think that really everything is just looping (orbiting/spinning) asynchronously so it appears that all this complicated random stuff is happening, but really it's all just a crap-ton of super-simple systems interacting. I think that science and reality are so obvious sometimes that we just can't see them - like air. The ancients knew that there was wind, that they could blow paper off a table and that it was hard to breath at high altitudes, but they didn't know until Empedocles (500–435 B.C.) used a clepsydras, or water-thief, to discover air that these were truly the same things.
And gravity, the overused example, was thought by the ancients to be a set of unrelated actions and happenings - to quote Disney's "the Sword and the Stone"
Merlin: Don't take gravity too lightly or it'll catch up with you.
Arthur: What's gravity?
Merlin: Gravity is what causes you to fall.
Arthur: Oh, like a stumble or a trip?
Merlin: Yes, it's like a stumble or a- No, no, no, it's the force that pulls you downward, the phenomenon that any two material particles or bodies, if free to move, will be accelerated toward each other
So, does that make it a "Grand Unified Theory" theory?
Dyslexics, sheesh!
"stiff and sloppy" variables.
I think they're saying they got a stiffy when they got published but didn't take that so far they got sloppy
This sounds a bit like a formalization, or maybe an expansion of, the Buckingham Pi theorem.
Welcome our gorge-traversing overlords.
Long since documented by our buddy Randall: http://xkcd.com/927/
Design for Use, not Construction!
'or how sound travels through space'
I thought that in space noone could hear you scream?!?
All that goes through my head is Bad Religion's "The Answer". And yes, I know the song is referring to religious zealotry, but it just happens any time I hear anything about "the answer to everything is...".
Metaphysics is a science
I'll believe you when you can devise a way that metaphysical results, such as the result presented in this article, can be falsified.
Does their theory explain how their own theory works?
Cause' otherwise its really something else that "works".
Like an opinion or belief or something subjective like that.
So we're just randomly posting that link to every Slashdot story now?
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Scientific theories only works when the minute details don't significantly affect the macro behavior (and vis-versa). That is, if there is a hierarchy of behaviors where theories can match the observations with some small uncertainty, the illusion of science is created with the assumed emergent continuum between apparently self-consistent levels of heirarchy.
Example of a simple hierarchy: the earth going around the sun is a macro-behavior, and testing molecular motion in a test-tube is a micro behavior. Although the hierarchy is not restricted simply to scale, but any aggregated parameter scientific model.
If a theory emerges for each where you assume the parametric effects on the other level of hierarchy are in the noise, you can discover a scientific theory (e.g., make hypothesis, test them, refine, etc), if no hierarchy emerges, you apparently cannot have scientific theory (e.g., cannot create testable hypothesis). Additionally, if you do have a scientific theory, you are implicity assuming that there is a continuum between the levels of your hierarchy (which is the underlying assumption of science).
These folks apparently assert that taking the eigenvalues of the Fisher Information Matrix predicts the emergence of a hierarchy. This apparently is because similar patterns result when analyzing the scientific modeling in other fields which have presumed scientific theories and they are theorizing that this is some sort of prerequisite of any model for which a scientific theory can be formed.
...with you.
My question is "how is this research more useful than a phone sanitizer?"
I can't speak of the article because it's paywalled, but if you like I can answer your question from my impression of the abstract.
Scientific theories are ultimately about data compression: they allow us to represent a sea of experiential data in a small space. For example, to predict the travel of a cannonball you don't need an almanac cross-referencing all the cannon angles, all the possible gunpowder charges, and all the cannonball masses. There's an equation that lets you relate measured numbers to the arc of the cannonball, and it fits on half a page.
Scientific models are the same: they allow us to predict results from a simplified description. The brain contains an id, an ego, and a superego which have their own goals and weaknesses, and from this we can predict the general behaviour of people.
The problem is that we don't have any way to measure how good a theory is, or even whether it is any good at all; viz, the second example above. This, and our society's desperate motivation to publish, has led to a situation where we cannot always tell whether some science finding is significant or even true.
Some specific problems with science:
(Of course, there are "proposed" and "this seems right" answers to each of these problems above. A comprehensive "theory of theories" would be able to show *why* something is right by compelling argument without arbitrary human choice.)
To date, pretty much all scientific research is done using "this seems right" methods of correlation and discovery. This is not a bad thing, it has served us well for 450 years and we've made a lot of progress this way.
If we could tack down the arbitrary choices to a computable algorithm, it would greatly enhance and streamline the process of science.
They are intentionally trying to set themselves up to explain the differences between Physics on the large scale and the quantum level (which some would have considered a Holy Grail "Explanation of Everything").
I did search Arxiv before posting, but somehow missed it.
Thanks a lot!!!
now with the RealLife © engine!
Sounds like the first step in Hari Seldon's Psychohistory. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/07/tampering-with-historical-destiny-isaac-asimovs-foundation-trilogy
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.6738v1.pdf
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Scientific models tend to express a common computational relationship. That's because we like to quantify things in scientific models, and perhaps unsurprisingly, we have a fairly standard paradigm for quantitative analysis in our mathematical algebraic, geometric and topological models.
The physicists here are discussing a feature of using information theory to generalize how certain fixed parameters can take values at different scales while still preserving most of their predictive structure. That's all.
Science journalists need to stop sensationalizing mathematically interesting results. This is a neat account of scale and pattern matching in applied mathematics, but it's not a "unified theory of all scientific theorising" any more than, say, Bayesian Inference is.
Myu:
I wonder if anyone will ever be able to explain what they're saying to the rest of us. Looks like total gibberish, or Wolfram's NKS.
The point of science ought to be to train you to think deductively, if your intellectual interests lie in the natural world. I am glad that most of the variables in most scientific models are irrelevant, and as others have commented, statisticians make much hay of this fact. But the next time someone comes along and shows why some tiny discrepency in calculated values is actually due to some effect that nobody understood before, there will be tremendous ramifications. The most famous example would be that the actual mass lost in uranium fission is 0.1%. Sure, only a few things matter to make fission happen, but that's not the science, that's engineering. The science is checking all the things we think are true, and then comparing our assumptions to our observations. So maybe, as in the case of a cell, if you want to design drugs *a lot like the ones we already have* you can ignore most of the variables in cell biology and just focus on the relevant ones. But that's not science, that's the application of science. Science comes from applying patterns that nobody even considered before. I'm studying group theory right now, so quantum mechanics comes to mind. New logic==all bets are off. That's it.
Science can make some interesting predictions about the possible future states of a system without necessarily telling you the future state the system will take. For example, if an isolated astronaut were in space and threw a baseball in one direction he will move in the opposite direction such that angular momentum will be conserved. Our oversimplified physics and chemistry model may not be able to tell you the exact location the astronaut - ball system will be in twenty hours from now but it can tell you that angular momentum will be conserved so we should not expect the isolated astronaut (with no other forces acting on him) to be traveling twenty miles an hour in one direction without the ball traveling at some predictable speed in the other. So a simplified model of physics may give us an array of possible (or impossible) future states a system can later take without necessarily telling us the exact future state the system will take. This can help us make (generalized) predictions about what the future may and may not hold without telling us exactly what the future will hold.
Another example is if you spill a bucket of water onto the ground. Science may not tell us exactly where each water molecule is going to land but it will, statistically, tell us that the water molecules will tend to go down and land in this approximate location. Or if you mix two chemicals for a chemical reaction. You may not know exactly what molecule will interact with each and exactly when and how each and every molecule is going to behave but chemistry can give you a useful approximation of their tendencies (products, reactants, etc...) to get a pretty good and useful idea of the future state of the reaction.
The Theorem Theorem
Is this more of that "emergence" crap?
The point of science ought to be to train you to think inductively
FTFY