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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."
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...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.
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.
Can someone explain this with a car analogy?
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
> Can anyone find a free copy that we can examine?
Archive link
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, here you go : http://xkcd.com/793/
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.6738v1.pdf
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."