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Have Some Physicists Abandoned the Empirical Method?
HughPickens.com writes: Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser write in the NY Times that two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, recently published a controversial piece called "Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics," that criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today's most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are "sufficiently elegant and explanatory." Whether or not you agree with them, Ellis and Silk have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given physics its credibility.
Quoting: "Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts. These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any."
Richard Dawid argues that physics, or at least parts of it, are about to enter an era of post-empirical science. "How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally," ask Frank and Gleiser. "Are superstrings and the multiverse, painstakingly theorized by hundreds of brilliant scientists, anything more than modern-day epicycles?"
Quoting: "Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts. These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any."
Richard Dawid argues that physics, or at least parts of it, are about to enter an era of post-empirical science. "How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally," ask Frank and Gleiser. "Are superstrings and the multiverse, painstakingly theorized by hundreds of brilliant scientists, anything more than modern-day epicycles?"
If you can't test a hypothesis by experiment, then it's nothing more than speculation.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Not verifiable through experiment, but reasonable enough to pay the rent.
can fit on the head of a pin? Same issue different time. As the previous poster said no data no science!
Social Scientists regularly jettison reproducible, empirical methods of gathering data in favor of cherry-picking to push ideological outcomes in their studies. Biologists are starting to do the same. It's all about producing the right "narrative" now. "Problematic" facts will be discarded, and any semblance of objective truth will be damned.
There are alternative theories, and they probably ought to get much more attention than they do. I think the fact that science is a career for people these days, makes them more keen to play things safe.
For example, Professor Mike Mcculloch's MiHsC http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.co.uk/ seems to predict a variety of otherwise anomalous observations rather well, without endless fudge factors. He's a respected academic, but seems to get little mainstream scientific attention.
Exactly. It then stays what it is: a hypothesis, not a theory.
-- Cheers!
It is disturbing that the problem is starting to effect physics. They should have been a bastion of resistance. Though, if the softness is in the cosmology department than that is more understandable.
In any case, if they're not backing up their theories with empirical observation or experimentation then it isn't science... at all.
So that has to happen.
This reminds me of when I heard some journalists say "it is impossible to be objective so there is no point trying. Take sides."... that's not journalism.
No one said your jobs were easy. But you have to play by the rules or you're not doing your job.
Scientists need to base their theories on empirical observation or experimentation.
Journalists need to control conflicts of interest and be as objective as they can... and where it isn't possible and there is no one else to report on the issue, at the very least declare your bias.
This nonsense is a bit like a judge saying he doesn't need to worry about conflicts of interest. Or when police officers say they don't need to give people due process.
You have to go through a process to be doing your job in these professions. You go through the process and you're a scientist, a journalist, a judge, a police officer.
If you don't... then you're just some asshole walking around with a badge that doesn't mean anything.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Look at all the fun the social scientists have with their lack of empiricism.
Also, abandoning empiricism is the only way for science to become the new opiate of the masses.
... doesn't mean we should give up.
The awkwardness of the state of physics simply informs that we have no brilliant physicists at this time.
We just have to wait and keep at it.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Although some things are very difficult to be experimentally proven (for example: most of cosmological related phenomena), building "elegant" theories one on top of the other should be avoided at all cost. Actually, I am currently taking a look at some of these abstract theories and it is very surprising how far some people can get just by assuming, without even making sure about the correctness of the assumptions they are building their theory on.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Who says the only useful/productive mathematical and scientific activities are hypothesis generation?
When Emmy Noether develops algebraic invariant theory, does she know that some physicists are going to call her up for help with general relativity?
After enough of these cases, physicists are trying to develop their own interesting, novel mathematical contributions. Who knows, maybe some of them will have applications.
The most outrage I can muster here is that some of these researchers are housed in the wrong departments. The horror.
-I find redundant sign-offs annoying
Speculation implies a certain objectivity. We don't even see that within certain fields these days.
Instead, we have unprovable theories that are held up as fact. We have scientists who are considered never to be wrong. We have ideas that cannot be questioned.
That isn't science. That isn't even speculation. That is religion, plain and simple.
Question: Are some physicists theoretical physicists while others are experimental physicists?
Answer: Duh...
IF you are not willing to even entertain the idea of trying to back up your ideas with the scientific method you are not a scientist. You are a philosopher. For the longest time 'Aether' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories) was considered an elegant solution. The scientific method proved it to be bollocks. BUT if every scientist simply went 'yeah that is a simple and elegant solution' Aether would still be considered a valid scientific idea. That is what separates scientists from navel gazers.
When a theory seems interesting, you can't just give up on it saying "Oh, there's no way to test it!". Who knows? Down the line when it's fully fleshed out, it might make predictions that can be tested. It might have a much more elegant explanation of existing patchwork theories. Ultimately you have to ask yourself whywe do physics. We don't do it to stick to some ideal standard. We do it for fun, for ourselves. To satisfy our craving for understanding.
Curiosity is a much bigger motivation that will not be arrested simply because someone points out that a theory can't be tested at this time. Every development, every idea, every thought is useful in some way or the other. If not directly, then indirectly. Ideas that are developed now can be used decades later in a new theory. We have to lay the seeds, bring out all the wayward theories and develop all the conceivable mathematical tools.
No, I don't consider any of this wasted effort at all.
If it can't be verified or falsified by experiment, if it makes no useful predictions, it has no business being published as science. It is, at best, fluff for the academic. Science will go on without the "contributions" of those who propose the unscientific.
Untested theories are not the equal of experimentally verified theory.
That does not mean they are completely without value.
It's not either-or.
The problem is that theoretical physics is nowadays controlled by people who have been doing string theory for thirty years or more. They are the ones calling the shots when it comes to grants, funding and future lines of research. These people are not just going to acknowledge that they have wasted their careers pursuing a set of ideas that have no relevance to the actual workings of physics. Hence the position described in the article.
These dinosaurs will not change. As usual, progress will resume simply because they will retire and die - the younger generations, even if brainwashed in the string theory approach, still have long careers ahead - and most of their members will not wish to be associated with dinosaurs.
Speculation. It's bad form to say hypothesis, because while it doesn't strictly refer to only scientific hypotheses, it is commonly implied. Stop abusing the terminology.
If we find any more Emmy Noethers, and they happen to be housed in physics departments, I say we continue their funding. Of course, it's always hard to judge which will be the more long lasting contributions, but if it weren't, it wouldn't be "research".
I swear, funding of basic research has enough enemies in this world -- it hurts to see it all over slashdot.
But what happens when you have multiple theories that agree with all the experiments we can make, and the only areas where they differ are for experiments we cannot make? Any of them would still be better than the current theories.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
That's probably the biggest fundamental danger with something like String Theory that currently has no method to test; if it effectively becomes dogma over centuries or even decades in the way that the Earth-centric Universe had then it's very, very difficult to undo that even when a new hypothesis with actual compelling evidence is crafted. The problem isn't even necessarily among scientists either, though they can have their doubts, but in a public that doesn't understand the scientific process and is unwilling to accept a scientific challenge to their deeply-held world views and religious perspectives.
I suppose that's why I want scientists to continue working on other hypotheses for the explanation of the fundamental structure of the Universe, so that scientists and the public don't make too many assumptions about what's right versus what's still up for debate.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Was nice while it lasted.
If they make predictions about things that are inherently unfalsifiable, the theories should be stripped down to respect that boundary.
If they make predictions about things that are falsifiable, but not within our reach to test at present, then keep all the theories.
In many ways, we're not so different than the Greeks trying to measure the speed of sound - without good clocks. The Standard Model may be the Taj Mahal of empericism. It has plenty of predictive power, based on lots and lots of observations, but is almost completely lacking in explanitory power. Weight of the electron? Value of the strong nuclear force? Meh, ask me a hard one. Modern physicists today are like people who work in a restaraunt but can never leave. "Damn", they say to each other, "it gets busy like that every day at 12:05. Watch, it'll do it again tomorrow." - such is the state of physics tday - all observation, no explanation, no true understanding why things are that way. Chemistry doesn't have that problem, they can pretty much explain ALL of chemistry from first principles. Of course the Plank distance and energy plus uncertanty put an absolute limit on observation, so, in some ways, we can never get out of the restaraunt.
Cosmologists are in the same boat, just at different scales. Untestable assumptions like "space is uniformly flat everywhere" and "the gravitational constant and the speed of light is the same everywhere and everywhen" lead us to conundrums like Dark Matter(TM) and Dark Energy(TM) just to put a label on the things we are ignorant about because the sums (and assumptions) don't add up.
TL;DR If you have an explanatory story where the math works, I, for one, don't care, and don't think it matters if your story amounts to "it's turtles all the way down". At least then we can start trying to dream up experiments and observations to prove or disprove it. But physics current OBSESSION with empericism has us painted into a corner where we don't have (and may never be able to have) the equipment to come up with defintive answers directed from observation rather than directed from theory.
There's no problem at all with being a mathematician or a philosopher of science. I'm a physicist, and I don't think any of my colleagues would argue that these fields should go away or that physicists shouldn't work in them. Emmy Noether is a great example of how people outside physics can help develop new physics.
But... relativity wasn't accepted until it was tested. Neither should any other theory coming out of advanced mathematics. Simply being around for a long time is not enough to move a set of math from clever speculation into physics. We've been down this path before. Allowing foundational theories to be integrated into the rest of physics without verification might end up fine, or it might waste the careers of a generation of physicists. Today, that also might mean many billions of dollars of funding and significant public trust.
Yes! This article better not be an attempt to keep the 'dark matter' handwave going for another generation without direct proof.
Let me rephrase that: Global warming as enunciated by media popularizers is untestable.
The best evidence that it exists is melting of long-term ice in different parts of the world. But as a theory, in which you can predict specific weather changes when you feed it new observational data and then turn the crank, it's a complete failure.
Since the scientific method for a scientific theory starts with a scientific hypothesis (everything in bold is Greek - i am a Greek by the way) i don't understand why it is "bad form" or "abuse of the terminology" - "hypothesis" is translated to Greek as "speculation" and a "scientific hypothesis" is a (scientific) speculation.
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Joseph Silk has no room to talk on this issue. We just spent 700 million dollars to find the gravity waves that would exist if his model of cosmic inflation actually happened. (planck mission) The evidence for gravity waves was proven not to exist. His theory has actually been proven wrong. Has he changed his theory? I doubt it. Instead he is walking around complaining about mathematicians exploring complex theories that will be testable at some time in the future. What a maroon.
This is the truth.
Let them dream. The ability to test these hypotheses by experiment will come along soon enough. Just because it now lags behind doesn't mean we should just stop the show.
And, this supposed "non-empirical science" is not new. I bet we can come up with many examples of hypotheses that took decades to be properly tested.
Pop science fans like the ones you find working in tech can be so bloody-minded.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The idea that physics was this pristine area of pure science, rigorously following the scientific method is an illusion. Most science has always been junk; the good stuff gets separated from the bad stuff by people building on it over decades and centuries.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with untestable physical theories; if you don't like to call them physics, call them "physics-inspired applied math". While not useful in themselves, they may lead to better, testable physical theories eventually, or they may simply find applications in entirely unrelated areas.
Problems only arise when people say things like "it's been published in a peer reviewed physics journal and lots of physicists believe it to be true, therefore we must spend lots of money to..."
I have a different version of the question.
Has the general public set aside empiricism as a standard against which to judge funding appropriations in the name of fundamental scientific progress?
I say no.
The public has not set aside empiricism as part of the social contract through which public money is directed at research institutions. Once the public understands how tenuous empiricism has become among research physicists, the tiny trickle we already provide will only get smaller.
So here's my message to all the modernist physicists out there ready to bury Karl Popper (there were one or two in this year's Edge question): speculate all you want about the non-falsifiable multiverse, but use the Templeton Foundation to fund your chalk supply, and whisper sweet nothings on bent knees so that they also fund your chalk boards, bean bag chairs, and baloney sandwich cafeteria.
It's not like public research funds have nowhere else to go. Proteomics, as difficult as it is, has not yet broken free of its empirical yoke (the complexity of this field begins with the water molecule, and ramps up from there).
We should start with the auto-immune diseases which ought to be simpler systems—if, in fact, they are indeed auto-immune diseases after all.
There really ought to be an entire chapter in Kahneman's next book devoted to the human psychology quirk through which an otherwise sensible person willingly exchanges ten of twenty free physical parameters for 10^500 fiendishly complex initial conditions and calls it a good deal.
More and more physics seems to be relying on simulations. In a case in which a theory has been discarded because it can't account for certain observed phenomena there can be a benefit in show that the theory can't be discarded. However it seems like there are more cases in which a simulation seems to be used as evidence that a theory is correct. http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.0481...
String theory has been somewhat predictive and new experiments in particle physics can be compared to expectation with string theory without needing to modify the theory.
However a lot of theories do not seem to be very testable or have any likelihood of being testable. Here is some "evidence" I came up with for the theory that we are living in a simulation. I use minecraft to illustrate. Probably others have provided the same evidence, I am just not aware of them. It has the same problem of some of theories coming out, it does not seem to be predictive and testable.
1) Quantum mechanics/uncertainty principle.
Assume that any construct must have limited resources.It would require substantially less "memory" and "cpu power" to estimate particles and groups of particles using equations rather than track the particulars of every particle and its interaction. Only when a query for the state of a specific particle occurred would the value be determined. Once the actually value were determined, the behavior would no longer match the shorthand equations that governed undetermined particles.
Minecraft analogy: Minecraft is an unlimited world in which each "block" [piece of earth or other material] can be manipulated. So unlike most game there are no walls or objects that can't be destroyed or moved, etc. Blocks objects are not instantiated until someone interacts with it. In this way many properties are not fully determined until the interaction occurs.
2) Speed of light
The speed of light limits the amount of interaction. It is extremely computationally intensive to have everything interact with everything else simultaneously. With the speed of light, interaction is limited to a single direction from source to object. While two objects might interact together, say by reflecting each other on their surfaces, the reflection is actually showing the other object from a point early in time that was "computed" on the prior "cycle". Aggregates can be used for distance objects. For example the light of a distance galaxy would not need to be computed with every individual particle.
Minecraft analogy: There is a render distance. Based on the graphical and network power the user can adjust the render distance. Objects beyond that distance are not visible and the display does not need to account for them.
Interestingly the speed of light indicates, to some extent, the type of construct. In a typical simulation of a reality, all values are computed simultaneously and then the next time cycle is calculated. This is used when attempting to model of a "real" system in which accuracy is more important than performance.
3) Planck time
This is the equivalent of CPU cycle or a singe "tick" in Minecraft
4) Unusual physics at "extreme" values
Strange things happen and "extreme" values like Bose-Einstein condensates, singularities and perhaps plasma. A construct of a system would be more concerned about behaviors within a "sweet spot" of interest.
Minecraft analogy: Minecraft uses double precision values for everything, including coordinates which are based on an integer number of blocks. There is a place in minecraft called "the far lands". If you travel far enough from your point of origin when the game is created, doubles no longer accurately represent integers. So blocks no longer form a continuous surface and there are occasional missing blocks and the player can get stuck between blocks or fall through "holes" in solid earth.
[Interesting aside: people can get to "the far lands" with mods etc. However once the creator announced the existence of "the far lands
However if you get your information from sources other than some outspoken media popularizers you will find that models are being produced in which you can predict specific changes when you feed it new observational data and then turn the crank.
Try someone other than a British Sudoko puzzle writer or Danish economist next time and you'll see.
Keep in mind that "religion", when it is a belief *with* knowledge (of God) instead of a belief *without* knowledge (of God) IS empirical (a Greek word -i am a Greek by the way- meaning "derived from experience/observation"), it is just "non-scientific".
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
There's no problem at all with being a mathematician or a philosopher of science. I'm a physicist, and I don't think any of my colleagues would argue that these fields should go away or that physicists shouldn't work in them. Emmy Noether is a great example of how people outside physics can help develop new physics.
But... relativity wasn't accepted until it was tested. Neither should any other theory coming out of advanced mathematics. Simply being around for a long time is not enough to move a set of math from clever speculation into physics. We've been down this path before. Allowing foundational theories to be integrated into the rest of physics without verification might end up fine, or it might waste the careers of a generation of physicists. Today, that also might mean many billions of dollars of funding and significant public trust.
You say this like there's some cabal deciding on 'allowing foundational theories into the rest of physics without verification'.
If you look at the Dec. 2014 Nature article that sparked the NYTimes article, you'd see that the concern there isn't even about the conduct of science itself -- it's about the worry that apparent dissent among scientists will fuel anti-scientism. So we'd better work out these 'what's experimentally verifiable' questions far away from the inquiring public.
There's no real worry that somehow the world's best and brightest physicists have forgotten about falsifiability.
Yes I know - rah rah all science is full of fraud some guy in the Lancet said so. Only he didn't.
You are only saying it is a problem throughout science so you can feel better about accusing every climate scientist of being a fraud so that you can toe your petty political line and fit in with other radicals that pretend to be "conservative". Denial of the authority of experts is very much the opposite of being "conservative".
A scientific hypothesis is, by definition, falsifiable. I've never liked the word "testable": some of the greatest confirmations in the history of science were simply observations of the universe around us, not "tests" one could run in the lab. From the observation of gravitational lensing during an eclipse as predicted by general relativity, to the CMBR temperature curve matching the blackbody curve, as predicted by the big bang theory, many of humanity's "science: it works, bitches" moments weren't "tests".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You have a very Christiocentric viewpoint. It's not about believing in the Christian God. It's about believing in god or gods. Those god or gods could be unsubstantiated scientific theories like string theory or climate change. They could be scientists that are worshipped, like Dr. Stephen Hawking. They don't have to be anthropomorphic sky beings.
As a remarkably insightful poet once wrote,
Religions arise all of the time. Religions can even worship a smooth fabric like black velvet.
Purely empirical science gave us the "element of fire", phologoston. A bit of theoretical work considering the oxidation of Iron resulted in the discovery of oxygen.
An answer to "why does this happen" is better than a recipe book, and "burying Popper" is a piss poor description of what is really happening as theory pushes ahead of what we can test for now. Some of the crystallography theories on the 1920s couldn't be tested until the 1970s for instance.
String theory has in no way become dogma, except to those who keep looking for drama where there is none.
No one's going to be rejecting LHC results which explicitly refute large chunks of string theory (and lets be clear: every particle accelerator has been setting some fairly rigorous bounds on all sorts of hypotheses over the years). Just as people were plenty interested in a possible confirmation of neutrinos moving faster then light in a major experiment.
Let me rephrase that: Global warming as enunciated by media popularizers is untestable.
Possibly. Is there only a single such theory? Who cares what the popularisers say?
The best evidence that it exists is melting of long-term ice in different parts of the world.
... and the rising global temperatures, and the rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and there are probably a few other indicators as well.
But as a theory, in which you can predict specific weather changes when you feed it new observational data and then turn the crank, it's a complete failure.
They are climate models, not weather models, so that they don't work so well for weather prediction is no surprise. Good thing nobody is claiming that then, eh?
There are many religions, "nontheistic religions", that don't worship any particular god - your definition doesn't work. Perhaps you've heard of Buddhism? I would say that a religion necessarily includes a set of philosophical principles that guide us through daily life, however.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
in academics.
The problem is that there is a huge oversupply of Ph.D. and Ph.D. candidate labor for the number of positions available pure academic research and institutions.
People that offer incremental improvements or work—just lab stuff, just more data, just duplication research, or slight variations to tease out empirical nuances—are a dime a dozen and struggle to differentiate themselves. Real science is often workman-like and laborious.
On the other hand, if young Ph.D. candidates and people weaving their way through the identity-building process that is a Ph.D. focus on conceptual innovation and performances—ideas, narratives, radical departures—then they are seen as doing something "new" and "innovative" (which somehow has become what science is about in popular discourse, which creeps into academic discourse), and something that sells better in the presses and to the public when the monographs come out, enabling "crossover" works and coverage that is much more lucrative than straight empirical work that gets buried in the journals or small print runs. They also more attendees at the conferences, and by virtue of interviewing and appearing more, get more coverage for the institution that hires them, often doing more to drive prestige and enrollments.
I think market forces play into this in a significant way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
A "scientific hypothesis" starts as potentially falsifiable - my "criticism" (and/or question) was about the difference (if any) between the terms "speculation" and hypothesis.
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
If it can't be falsified, it's not even a scientific hypothesis. It's storytelling. It may be a very pretty story, or like String Theory it may be an artless sprawl of a story, but it's not science. It's not a theory until it's made enough predictions, predictions that differed from the null hypothesis, yet turned out to be true, to have gained widespread acceptance.
Yes, sure, stories can be valuable, can inspire, can teach. But we don't call that "science".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Observe, predict, test.
Nobody says *how* you should go about doing the "predict" part, so long as you test carefully afterwards. It happens that in certain fields of science, especially fundamental physics, prediction has become very difficult. And that's why we need a bunch of theoreticians developing wild new theories which we, the experimentalists, will then test. But as I said, this process isn't easy and takes some time. It takes time to develop the theory far enough to make concrete, testable predictions, and it takes time to develop the technology to carry out those tests.
Take string theory. Nobody in particle physics is under any illusion that this has been through the complete scientific process. String theory is not a scientific result, it is merely an intermediary phase in the discovery of something more complete than the existing Standard Model.
I see my occasional stalker has weighed in. Hopefully someday he or she will find the right combination of medications to get a lid on this peculiar behavior.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Some fundamental parts of physics may never be tested because you can't. How did the Universe start? You going to go back in time and see what really happened? We're reaching a point in physics where we can come up with decent ideas faster than we can test them because we're limited by technology. We may as well allow people to make "speculations" while waiting for tech to catch up so we can test them at some point in the future.
That's just terminology. All of mathematics is "storytelling". The fact is that physics desperately needs ideas more than anything else. And we need them in a flood. Who cares what terminology is used? Let people make ideas and follow them. Some may pan out. Most won't. So what?
If some people don't want to call it "science", let them. It doesn't matter.
I just try to define "un-scientific" (e.g., in case of a non-empirical "scientific method") as... "un-scientific" (!), NOT as "religion", because religion, even while un-scientific, can be empirical if it is a belief *with* knowledge (of God) instead of a belief *without* knowledge (of God) - in my case, a (Greek Orthodox) Christian, my religious beliefs are because of my empirical knowledge of God (note: of course it is un-scientific knowledge/statement, and i can't use a scientific method to prove my claim, but still i know the truth empirically - no need for anyone to get upset by that statement, it is just my personal example for the definitions).
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Meanwhile, the mainstream ignores Randall Mills' Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, which not only explains the stability of atoms and molecules, but predicted the mass of the Top Quark, the accelerated expansion of the universe, and the nature of Dark Matter. http://blacklightpower.wikia.c...
No, it starts out as falsifiable, or it's not a scientific hypothesis.
Whether it becomes falsified at some future point is irrelevant.
Useful hint: scientific/technical terms in modern English often have different meanings from the Greek/Latin words they're derived from.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There are some situations where a theory can't be falsified, but it does make predictions. Those can be useful, but you need to be careful not to assume it's correct even if it seems to work. Being right for the wrong reasons still has its merits.
"They are climate models, not weather models, so that they don't work so well for weather prediction is no surprise. Good thing nobody is claiming that then, eh?"
Unfortunately those media popularizers of carbon warming love to use it as their latest club against civilization and, ultimately, the human species itself. So they do nothing but claim that every kind of weather is evidence of carbon warming. They love to predict drought, because in most parts of the world that is the worst kind of weather. But they claimed last winter's Northern chill and Boston record snowfall also - no more of that wimpy "Weather is not climate" stuff. Now they are laying claim to the flooding in Texas, and I wouldn't doubt by next week, yesterday's torrential rain in Arizona.
When social conflicts arise there has been a certain reluctance to admit that much of science rests in faith. Obviously the universe as a whole can not be observed. And variables permeate every experiment. Yet those involved as professional scientists are aware that all progress halts if we only comply precisely with scientific methods. Some phenomena simply can not be isolated or studied under controlled conditions. And we are aware of certain chemical reactions created under the most controlled conditions can have several different end results. So we do hear terms like the underlying fabric of space which are not observable to us at all. In some cases we may reason out an issue but the actual proof of the subject may be centuries away. And we also do not know if the physics that we reason with are universal in nature or perhaps just occurring in certain localities in the universe. Even looking at a star in the sky only tells us that that star existed years and years ago and being that gravity bends light who the heck really know how many times that light was bent or redirected. We really only observe the history of what the universe looked like at various times.
Difficult to say. Might I suggest doing some sort of experiment?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I understand that "scientific/technical terms in modern English often have different meanings from the Greek/Latin words they're derived from" (something i find very problematic and wrong, since... Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." !), so that was why i used the word "criticism" , especially about the indefinite terminology: we still have problems with that hypothesis term (and you surely understand what is my opinion) - do you have a definition for the "scientific speculation" term?
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Fine. Do it on your own dime and file it in the drawer labelled "Things To Do Later".
The German term Gift is also derived from gift, but the meaning is quite the opposite. It means poison. So while you are right about the origin of the words, the meaning of words change. The terms theory and hypothesis have a distinct meaning in science and they differ from the original. However, it is still not far away. A hypothesis must be testable, however, it starts out being a speculation, but only if you can provide a way to test the hypothesis. Otherwise it is a untestable speculation and then you have to believe in it. That is more religion than science.
So you are saying those theories were NOT TESTED?
> Purely empirical science gave us the "element of fire", phologoston.
The reason we went beyond that is because It could be tested and proven wrong.
The discussion is about "testing no longer needed", not "testing done later". As it clearly says in article and even summary.
It will be run by a phrenologist with a lie detector.
Put her in the Comfy Chair!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Social Scientists regularly jettison reproducible, empirical methods of gathering data in favor of cherry-picking to push ideological outcomes in their studies. Biologists are starting to do the same. It's all about producing the right "narrative" now. "Problematic" facts will be discarded, and any semblance of objective truth will be damned.
That obviously depends on the size of the 'head or a pin'
Anyway shouldn't we be talking aboint the point of a pin which is a lot smaller.
And an 'angel' is 1,000 feet (altitude)
string theory is mocked by over half of physicists as being useless and unverifiable. In fact some it's predictions such as SUSY have taken huge hits in the last ten years.
About that "is more religion than science" - from a comment i made somewhere else:
I just try to define "un-scientific" (e.g., in case of a non-empirical "scientific method") as... "un-scientific" (!), NOT as "religion", because religion, even while un-scientific, can be empirical if it is a belief *with* knowledge (of God) instead of a belief *without* knowledge (of God) - in my case, a (Greek Orthodox) Christian, my religious beliefs are because of my empirical knowledge of God (note: of course it is un-scientific knowledge/statement, and i can't use a scientific method to prove my claim, but still i know the truth empirically - no need for anyone to get upset by that statement, it is just my personal example for the definitions).
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Abandoning empirical methods and verifiable experimentation is fine - it just cannot be called science - its philosophy or maybe even fiction.
This is the basis of the split with Bohr and Einstein so long ago that in my view even now has not been satisfactorily resolved. When things are too small to measure, its fine to dream up ideas, but this should lead to finding a way to measure objectively or its really just fiction.
Greed is the root of all evil.
The problem though, is that we might be approaching the limits of what is testable in modern physics by non-godlike beings. Yes, some supercollider might find something new that's inconsistent with superstring or alternative hypothesis, hence disproving them.
But we might also never find anything new at all. It's not impossible that we have already discovered all the fundamental particles that exist, or that those remaining would require the controlled annihilation of entire galaxies to create (aka the exertions of godlike beings). In which case our experiments could invalidate any hypotheses which *requires* intermediate particles, but sufficiently broad or untestable hypotheses (such as superstrings, taken as a class) would remain forever unfalsified.
Of course the flip side is that if we are entering such a period, then it's largely irrelevant what theories we adopt. So long as they're consistent with observable reality, that's all that really matters. With a couple caveats:
1) If the accepted theory actively discourages research in directions that *would* reveal new physics, we have a problem.
2) If the theories remain broadly accepted for long enough (many generations?) then there is a danger that if conflicting data is eventually found it will be rejected or suppressed. Many a researcher has had their career devastated by making claims inconsistent with accepted science, especially if the results can't be consistently replicated (a hallmark of new phenomena where we don't actually understand what's happening, but *something* seems to be). Fleischmann and Pons spring to mind - granted they did a particularly irresponsible job of releasing their findings, but follow-up research does continue to dangle tantalizing hints that under certain poorly-understood conditions fusion does occur.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That is not the same thing as string theory, there is verifiable evidence for dark matter, defined as matter having gravitational effect on galaxy shape for which there is no known accounting yet.
As soon as some discipline has identified a method that actually works, some idiots crop up that claim it is too much effort and try to do things on the cheap, despite it being well-known that that does not work. Whether it is some physicists abandoning the scientific method, software creation with barely capable people, teaching that ignores that the person of the teacher is central, stability of the financial system, vaccinations, keeping peace, maintaining freedoms, etc.
Getting to a point where things actually work is hard. But it seems that staying there is even harder, because many humans cannot recognize that many things take real effort to do right and all shortcuts come at a hefty price.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That actually depends on the claims made. If, like the quoted string theorists, they claim to have the truth, then it is indeed religion. If they just claim to have a possible model, then it is scientific modeling, which is science. Experimentation only becomes critically important to the scientific method when you claim to have something accurately modeling reality. You can do a lot of scientific work and never do one experiment.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's not a theory until it's made enough predictions
What makes a theory a scientific theory is only that it makes testable predictions. You want to talk about validity, though as a falsificationist you're stuck.
Required reading for internet skeptics
physics desperately needs ideas
What do you based that claim on? Physics is drowning in ideas; what it needs now is data. Every piece of high-end apparatus, from the LHC to large telescopes, is so over-saturated with ideas, with proposed tests and observations, that it's a big challenge just to decide which experiments are the most important to run.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We may be running into a fundamental limitation of the scientific method. By Goedel's impossibility theorem, for a given set of logical rules and axioms, there will always exist logical constructs which are unprovable - i.e. cannot be determined to be true or false. "This sentence is false." Is it true or false? For a physical analogue, if everything we know about the speed of light is correct, there is no way to ever observe what is inside a black hole. Yet obviously there is something inside. The fact that we can't observe it within the limitations imposed by physics doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It falls into a class of physical phenomena which can't be tested by the scientific method.
I've been trying to explain this to people this for years. Logical truth isn't binary. Every hypothesis (theory, speculation, faith, whatever you want to call it) doesn't resolve into being true or false. They resolve into true, false, or cannot be determined. While by the standards of the scientific method something in the "cannot be determined" category cannot be shown to be true, it is equally erroneous to decide it is false. So contradictory to what many rationalists think, there are actually three categories of belief - scientific truth (belief in things provable by science), superstition (belief in things disproven by science), and what for lack of a better word I'll call supposition (belief in things that cannot be proven nor disproven by science). String theory probably falls into the third category, which is why it's wrong to lump string theorists with the second category simply because it can't be proven by the scientific method.
From a mathematical standpoint, even if string theory is wrong, if it can come up with accurate predictions, it can still be useful and worth pursuing. Early astronomers believed the planets were painted onto spheres, and attempted to define their motion across the sky as a circle within a circle, offset slightly from the observer While we now know that their method was wrong, the predictions these circles came up with were pretty accurate. Basically it's like using a nth order polynomial to fit a set of data points. The phenomenon that created those data points probably isn't a nth order polynomial, but if the polynomial can accurately predict in-between data points, then it doesn't really matter that it's wrong. You just need to be careful of extrapolating outside the data points, or expecting more accuracy from your prediction than the accuracy of your data points.
I disagree. We have lots and lots of data. What we need more is a coherent framework to put it all together. The data from the LHC is so vast that processing it is a herculean task. More frameworks, more ideas will help make sense from all of it.
There's no such thing as "post-empirical science." That sort of scholarship already has a name: "religion."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
When the new cosmos touted the multiverse on their very first show as a fact I lost a lot of respect for the show. Glad to see that others are now agreeing that it is pseudo-science almost as much as the bible is until actually being falsifiable.
Unless you consider "Hope that you don't piss the gods off" to be a guiding philosophical principle, that's still a fairly restrictive definition of religion. Consider, for example, Roman religion: it provided structure to daily life, but was largely orthogonal to the philosophical guidance of schools such as stoicism and epicureanism.
As long as they get funding, they don't care. Sticks and stones, etc.
Cut off their funding, and it will all fade away into who-cares-ville.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
It is seemingly paradoxical, but in New York it now snows less often and they get more snowfall: http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
I can't comment on the cases that you take issue with because you haven't provided sources, but it is possible that an area could expect more floods and more droughts as the climate changes.
You can't use the ancient Greek meaning. In the modern technical context, a hypothesis is something that can be tested. A theory is a larger body of explanations. Look here for the specifics of statistical hypothesis testing in the last hundred years or so. This is basic Stats 101 stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_hypothesis_testing
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Unobservable things are fine so long as they are part of the explanatory framework required to account for all the observations.
Time is my favorite example of this. We can only ever observe the present. We have a strong natural intuition that there is also a past and a future, but strictly speaking we can't observe either of them. What we can observe are facts about the present that are best explained by a hypothesized past, and which in turn imply things about a hypothesized future.
Mostly I think of this in analogy to the many worlds interpretation. Other possible worlds are exactly as real as other times. In one sense, only the actual world is real, just like in that sense only the present is real; but in a broader sense, the best explanation of the actual world involves a framework invoking other worlds, just like the best explanation of the present involves a framework invoking other times.
In a really strict sense, even space is a theoretical framework like this. We only directly interact with things locally. We posit that there are other things over there in another place because, for one, we're evolutionarily programmed to jump to that conclusion, but even if not, because the best explanation for why there are a certain configuration of e.g. photons here where I exist seeing something is that they travelled, in various patterns according to various laws, from other places elsewhere.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Sigh... some of modern science is so astoundingly expensive
that this may be the only way to play the game for the vast
majority of talent.
However as a man with knowledge of Greek said he has
little issue with the language.
Yet, one man published a paper that caused harm.
The Wakefield Lancet paper was presented as science yet was
just a well crafted fiction. It is this Wakefield like cruft that
must be squashed.
A neighbor mentioned in passing that it can be more difficult
to write fiction than fact because fiction must be consistent.
He referred me to to M Twain.
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
Mark Twain
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Every one is explaining to me what a "(scientific) hypothesis" is (by the way: it is not some "ancient Greek" word but just Greek... we use this word in Greek everyday!), but none has explained to me what is the definition (if different from "(scientific) hypothesis") of the "(scientific) speculation"!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Exactly. It then stays what it is: a hypothesis, not a theory.
Except without an empirical basis, it's not even a hypothesis. It's just interesting math with no basis in reality. "Not even wrong" applies here.
I think the short answer to the title is 'no'. There have been times in science when we have had no good experiments we could do with the apparatus we have at the time, and have had to speculate. Current theories about the inflationary period of the Big Bang are pretty odd, and very short of actual experiment. We have the LHC results which probe the quark-gluon state that we think existed at the time, and that tells that the physics isn't completely different or unexpected; and yet the big picture doesn't really add up. We may eventually come to a state where we have done the best experiments we can, and in the end the theory with the prettiest equations will win. But I think we are some way from that yet.
However, there is one argument that does worry me. I have seen people argue this way...
If Universes were created at random we are extremely unlikely to live in one where the fundamental parameters lead to the sorts of complexity that lead to lifeforms such as us with the intelligence to appreciate it.
There must therefore be many other barren Universes where everything collapses to one massive particle, or everything stays as isolated simple particles. We cannot detect them in any way, but we know they must exist because we are here. In some ways they have affected our Universe, as they have contributed to the overall probability that we can exist.
This is a strange idea. Some people think it is obvious. It feel to me like a convenient piece of sophistry to dump a lot of improbability that you cannot account for. I have to admit that if Universes sprang into being at random, then this argument would work in just this way, but I still don't trust it as an argument. This even stretches our use of the verb 'to be' beyond any other usage. 'Are there' other Universes, if we do not share a time-line? Or 'were there'. Or will we have to invent a new tense? It is going to be interesting to see how this one plays out.
In the meantime, I don't think any scientist, anywhere, is abandoning the search for experimental proof.
It's been long understood that scientific conjectures and hypotheses must be tested independently by people other than the ones that developed the ideas. Thus, Einstein didn't really much bother with experimental confirmation; that was the job of all the other physicists who (quite properly) didn't accept his ideas and were trying to disprove them. Real science does require verification, of course, but there's no reason to insist that it be done by the people who do the theoretical work. Also, there are known problems with people trying to experimentally verify their own hypotheses, which is why we so often read calls for independent testing.
So what's new about all this today? It sounds like Science As Usual to me. A lot of the hypotheses will never be tested, but that just means that they'll never graduate to the class of "theory".
A parallel that I've found instructive: In the publishing industry, it's well understood that proofreading must be done (if it's done at all ;-) by someone other than the author. It's difficult to proofread your own stuff, because you tend to read what you know should be there, not what actually is. I've seen this myself, with people pointing out typos in things I've put online that I know I proofread. I generally just fix the error, and send them a "Thanks" message, then go about what I was doing. Similar comments probably apply any time you're trying to actually get something right in any subject area.
One might be tempted to make the extreme suggestion that people shouldn't bother checking their own work. Just send it to an independent checker, perhaps someone who is willing to send you their work for checking. Send it to several such checkers, who have an understanding that you'll do the same for them. This way, people can concentrate on producing stuff that they're good at, and pay for it by spending time similarly checking other people's work that might not be so close and familiar.
I've seen evidence that this has sorta happened in a few fields. The idea is that you keep all the stuff you're working on online, in a semi-hidden place that your colleagues know how to access, but which isn't really "public". You might send email out occasionally asking them to read through a new document that you're putting together. This sort of setup happens a lot in software development, typically as online repositories clearly labelled as "development" to warn away non-technical "users". A mailing list or blog helps get people together who are willing to download and test new versions and send in bug reports. When you get enough colleages saying it seems to be working, you announce a new public release. This is not really very different from the old scientific concept of independent verification.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
A hypothesis is a falsifiable guess. A theory is a hypothesis with wide acceptance. Do they not teach this stuff in school any more?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
(something i find very problematic and wrong, since... Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." !
I don't. "rtrgaerg" doesn't have an inherent or universal meaning. What words mean is what we decide they mean not some meaning from an unrelated human endeavor.
There are plenty of meaning collisions out there. Words like stress, field, normal, trace, etc have wildly different meanings depending on what particularly nomenclature you are using. For example, "stress" has radically different meanings in human physiology, linguistics, and mechanical engineering.
we still have problems with that hypothesis term
Like what? It's pretty straightforward with a lot of philosophical work done by various parties. For example, the mentioned "falsifiability" is a characteristic ascribed to hypotheses by Karl Popper.
do you have a definition for the "scientific speculation" term?
Whatever the dictionary says. I'm not particular nor do I give it any real weight. Could be a bunch of doped up hippies sitting on a sofa talking about the universe, assuming they didn't stray too far from the science.
We know there are true but unprovable theorems in mathematics. Gödel showed this to be a rampant property of Peano arithmetic and anything more complex than that. Perhaps QM requires us to accept a similar fate: there are true but unprovable observations in reality.
Of course not. If they're not using the Scientific Method, they're not Physicists.
Right; they're called Mathematical Physicists. ;-)
Joking aside, this isn't necessarily bad science. It could be viewed as a mere division of labor. Actual science needs experimentation, observations, etc. to verify good hypotheses or reject bad hypotheses. But there's no real reason this all needs be done by the same person. One could easily argue that, if you have a good theoretician (textbook example: Einstein), it might be to everyone's benefit if they sit off in some ivory tower churning out their equations, while others with good knowledge of current technology work out the testing protocols, and yet others who are good in labs do the actual hands-on work. This might work better than trying to have one person do it all.
Of course, I'm really just suggesting that we continue with what we've been doing for a few centuries. Theoreticians have always turned out lots of ideas that were wrong, while occasionally being right. Sometimes they do some of the experimental/observational verification, but most of that has always been done by others.
The main problem is with educating the media and general public about it all. History says we haven't done a very good job of that. But again, one might argue that that's a part of the scientific enterprise that's best handed over to specialists in such communication. This is also not a very new idea. (Textbook examples: Sagan, Tyson.) We mostly just need more people who are good at that task.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I think the theories we are talking about are ones that do predict all the phenomena that we observe, just like the Standard Model does, but are in some way more elegant. The situation is, we have an existing theory X that predicts everything we observe, and someone comes along with theory Y that also predicts everything we observe, just like theory X, but some people find theory Y more elegant than X. Now, just because X came along first doesn't make it inherently preferable to theory Y. IMO, theory Y is an equally valid line of inquiry, in just the same way that mathematics is; and ultimately physicists will have to decide whether to spend their time learning theory X or theory Y based on their elegance, ease of use, and so on.
The "falsifiable" theory of science was invented by Karl Popper (IIRC) to distinguish science from things like religion. IMO it's a rather limiting view, and not all philosophers of science accept it as the One True Way. But it doesn't even matter for the present discussion. BOTH theories are falsifisable in that they predict observed phenomena; it's just that they are not differentially falsifiable (I mean, they predict the same thing).
The
You have the wrong criticism. Godel applies more to rationalism than empiricism. The problem with empiricism is that you only know what you can measure, and to the degree to which you can measure it. Science isn't (technically) logical, it's empirical. You should read about empiricism vs rationalism and refine/restate your ideas.
Though it can be an interesting idea with lots and lots of mathematics behind it. The science of physics is how to bring that domain of mathematics into the real world.
But even theories are falsifiable. Newton's theory of gravitation was falsified by measurements on the orbits of Mars, for instance.
-- Cheers!
LOL. Monied, thank you :)
-- Cheers!
What I was essentially pointing out is there there's no clear binary decision between testable and untestable. There's stuff that's very hard to test, stuff we may be able to test in 1000 years, stuff we don't know if we'll ever be able to test, ... And then when you have two theories that are "correct" wrt all the tests so far, then you have to use Occam's razor and pick the simplest. When you have hundreds of theory that all agree with experiments, then all the debate shifts to "Occam's razor-type arguments over which is most elegant/simplest". It's kinda unavoidable.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The tendency of scientists to become attached to their pet theories, even in the face of mounting evidence against them, is not new at all.
As for "If a theory successfully explains what we can detect but does so by positing entities that we canâ(TM)t detect (like other universes or the hyperdimensional superstrings of string theory) then what is the status of these posited entities? Should we consider them as real as the verified particles of the standard model? How are scientific claims about them any different from any other untestable â" but useful â" explanations of reality?", William of Ockham had the answer to that one.
This is where elegance comes in; if you have equally powerful explanatory/predictive theories, pick the most elegant, which includes considering undetectable (in theory) entities it predicts. A theory which doesn't require any undetectable entities is superior to one which does, assuming they predict/explain all the detectable ones equally. But the fact that a theory predicts entities which cannot be detected isn't a fatal flaw.
If the entities aren't detectable in theory, their actual existence is irrelevant; they have no effect on this universe whether they exist or not; detecting them would actually falsify the theory.
If they are detectable in theory but not in fact, then you're in the state the current Standard Model was in until the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. Nothing wrong with that.
Nonsense. A theory is a predictive model. An hypothesis is a testable prediction. An hypothesis doesn't grow up to become a theory, rather, theories generate hypotheses.
Required reading for internet skeptics
The Standard Model may be the Taj Mahal of empericism. It has plenty of predictive power...but is almost completely lacking in explanitory power.
Sorry but that is completely wrong. It has lots of explanatory power. For example it explains how the electron can have a mass without breaking essential symmetries of physics (via the Higgs mechanism), it explains how the EM and weak forces are two aspects of the same thing, it explains the existence of the different types of mesons and baryons which was such a mystery before the SM that one Nobel prize winner suggested that there should be a fine for discovering anymore particles before we explained those we had found! etc. (and there is a lot more!)
The problem is that we no longer talk about what the Standard Model did explain because we now know the answer so it is not so interesting anymore and we focus on the things which it does not explain. This is the nature of human inquisitiveness. Indeed the Standard Model is an astounding success. It took Particle Physics out of the 'particle zoo' era of stamp collecting and moved it to the forefront of fundamental physics research. It's certainly true that it contains some major holes and because of that nobody thought it would stand up this long to experiment. However it has survived over 40 years and is still the best model we have although some extensions, such as neutrino masses, have been needed.
As for making observations you clearly fail to grasp how science works. The way you find something beyond the SM is that you make a measurement of some process where new physics predicts X and the Standard Model predicts Y and you see which your measurement agrees with. The fact that for 40+ years every time we come up with a new measurement we get Y and never X is because that's the way the universe works. If you are unhappy with it then don't blame the physicists - it's not like we got a say in how the universe was put together!
Postmodernisim - the philosophy that really says that it is easy to be biased - so they don't even try.
And yes, real science is REALLY hard to do. So we get to the point where everyones opinion is just as valid as anyones else's - so if you have someone that believes in gravity and someone that doesn't - they should compromise?
Yes - we need theorists in physics - no we don't need theorists that build on unproven theorists that build on further unproven stuff. You end up with a bunch of junk that is worthless. (Yes - the results of science need to have some value - ability to predict things etc. )
There is a quote to this effect:
Give me four parameters and I can fit an elephant;
Give me five and I can wag its tail.
(The source of the above quote?? Variants have been
attributed to C.F. Gauss, Niels Bohr, Lord Kelvin, Enrico Fermi.)
Of course, producing worthless papers of speculation paid for with government grants (which come from people that actually work) - I suppose it is more fun than having to make it in the real world.
(something i find very problematic and wrong, since... Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." !
I don't. "rtrgaerg" doesn't have an inherent or universal meaning. What words mean is what we decide they mean not some meaning from an unrelated human endeavor.
There are plenty of meaning collisions out there. Words like stress, field, normal, trace, etc have wildly different meanings depending on what particularly nomenclature you are using. For example, "stress" has radically different meanings in human physiology, linguistics, and mechanical engineering.
We may decide that in a certain domain the word "rtrgaerg" means something, while in some other domain means something else, BUT a) it is problematic, especially for more "universal" words (i.e., existing in many domains, plus used in the "natural" language - e.g., "hypothesis"), or in other words: it may be useful for "variables" when we try to define the "universe of discourse" of a domain, but wrong when we want to use some "constants" for hyper-domains like "science" b) it still not answers my "question" about the hyper-domain of "science": what is the difference (if any) between a "scientific hypothesis" and a "scientific speculation"?
we still have problems with that hypothesis term
Like what? It's pretty straightforward with a lot of philosophical work done by various parties. For example, the mentioned "falsifiability" is a characteristic ascribed to hypotheses by Karl Popper.
I KNOW WHAT A HYPOTHESIS IS (even a scientific!): it is a speculation! Either we discuss about Greek or science! Right?
do you have a definition for the "scientific speculation" term?
Whatever the dictionary says. I'm not particular nor do I give it any real weight. Could be a bunch of doped up hippies sitting on a sofa talking about the universe, assuming they didn't stray too far from the science.
The "dictionary" of natural language, e.g., English, says that "hypothesis" and "speculation" is the same! Can you tell me, if you believe it is true, why it is an "abuse of terminology" (as the person i replied to originaly claimed) to use the term "hypothesis" if one of those doped up hippies in your example, using the "scientific method" to examine the question about the universe, makes a hypothesis about the universe that will be the first step *before* he tries to find if his hypothesis is falsifiable? I mean that even trying to find if a hypothesis is falsifiable... surely is science!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
It is disturbing that the problem is starting to effect physics.
The problem is not starting to affect physics. The reluctance to let go of Supersymmetry is nothing new and in any case I would argue it as extremely premature given the currently available data.
Take a look over a century ago at the Michelson-Morley experiment. While we regard it as the killing blow to the aether theory of light at the time the first explanations it engendered were suggestions of 'frame dragging' where somehow the Earth was dragging the aether along with it. This was hard to reconcile with astronomical observations but, as always, the first instinct of many is to adapt the existing theory to see whether it can account for the new data. What shifted the field after Michelson-Morley was Einstein coming up with a far, far better theory to explain the data than any aether based model.
Another example is the superweak theory which was invented to explain CP violation in kaon decays. As experiments put ever tighter limits on it theorists dialed down the strength making it weaker. What killed it was the Standard Model providing a better explanation via a complex phase in the CKM quark mixing matrix.
Reluctance to let go of the best theory you have is nothing new. As these theories become more and more constrained fewer people think them likely and start to look for better ones. When someone finds that better explanation and it is confirmed by experiment then the old theory is abandoned. Since Supersymmetry was invented to explain the huge difference between the planck scale (where gravity is important) and the mass of the higgs. Until there is a better explanation for this it is unlikely there will be a consensus to drop SUSY as a candidate theory.
Dark matter is a theory made to explain phenomena that the current model did not explain. Don't confuse the anomaly that required an explanation for evidence of the explanation.
That is the same mistake that prior physicists made when trying to do a Grand Unified Theory.
Most new theories came from the observation of interesting phenomena and often required the invention of new tools (e.g. Calculus). But the tools aren't the end point (like string theorists seem to think), nor is it trivial to just join together things which are mutually inconsistent without having more insight on how things work as they do.
Last year I attended the ICHEP conference in Valencia, Spain, the largest and probably most important conference in the field of high-energy physics.
The keynote speaker, Francois Englert, noble prize physics 2013, couldn't come, and rather last minute Alan Guth from MIT was upgraded to that main talk. He's one of the fathers of ithe theory of inflation, and with the BICEP results around a fitting match for a keynote talk.
He gave an excellent first half of his talk. After that, he wandered into the multiverse, unfortunately. To me, and to many others, we had left physics, and entered philosophy. After the talk the question, which I have no doubt many had in mind, was readily asked: what about the experimental testability of it all. The answer was quite unsatisfactory, unfortunately.
A "scientific hypothesis" starts as potentially falsifiable - my "criticism" (and/or question) was about the difference (if any) between the terms "speculation" and hypothesis.
A hypothesis that is not testable or falsifiable is a belief. Whether that belief is about a deity or abstract theory, doesn't matter.
But none of this really matters. No one is stopping another from doing "real science" if they wish. Everyone does what they enjoy. Everyone is happy!
what is the difference (if any) between a "scientific hypothesis" and a "scientific speculation"?
My view is that a hypothesis is a very specific, testable/falsifiable claim. Speculation is an informal process which rhetorically or intellectually explores some unknown aspect of scientific endeavor, but it need not actually come up with hypotheses.
makes a hypothesis about the universe that will be the first step *before* he tries to find if his hypothesis is falsifiable?
It's not a hypothesis until you have some way of theoretically determining to some degree whether it is true or false. Sure, you can make claims, which is a speculative activity, but you have to get to the point where you can think of theoretical ways to test those claims before they become hypotheses.
I KNOW WHAT A HYPOTHESIS IS (even a scientific!): it is a speculation! Either we discuss about Greek or science! Right?
It doesn't sound like you did actually, but I hope the above post helped.
I'll pout now. Come on guys!
Science is the axiomatization of falsifiable statements as either true or false through reference to real events and experiments. Experiments are not necessary to generate falsifiable theories, and there are plenty of theories that are impossible or nearly impossible to test. Testing for the Higgs boson took 50 years and billions of dollars. The experiments don't necessarily come first.
Our past is an ample source of real evidence. What happened was real, and is just as useful as any event intentionally produced in a lab. But the true value of science is in controlling and predicting future events and consequences. And for this, experimental validation is not asking for much. If we can't reproduce it in a lab, it will never make it to an iPhone. Hence irreproducible events are worthless to the pragmatic scientist and to every engineer. In most cases they're either not what they seemed or beyond our current scope anyway. We'll either get to a point where we understand it later, or we'll find out the scientist was lying -- the latter has turned out to be quite common.
All this theorizing and hypothesizing is simply part of the initial process. What has no consequence will be unobservable and untestable and unusable anyway. But imagination is already a consequence which at minimum has great entertainment value. The next step -- and quite an important step -- is seeing if any of it will make it out of our imagination.
Perhaps it's both. We have an overabundance of ideas like m-theory and inflation that are still looking for relevant data to indicate that they are even falsifiable let alone confirmed. Meanwhile we have massive amounts of data that so far just confirms what we already know, and it is like looking for a needle in a universe of haystacks to find evidence in all that data for the aforementioned theories.
And yet we have data that doesn't fit neatly in a single model. Hence the need or quest for unified theories in the first place. I mean...the current state of physics depends on a lot of data that doesn't fit a single framework.
And let's not even get started on dark matter. The entire concept was evolved to account for discrepancies in data that didn't fit existing models. If we can get a theory that not only explains everything we already know, but which also has a convenient explanation of what dark matter was meant to explain, that would be awesome.
Sure, a lot of theories might be crap. But it's worth popping them out nevertheless because the good ones can change the way we look at the world forever.
That is exactly my concern. Religion was an early way to attempt to interpret and understand the Universe. When religious dogma became quite literally set in stone it was difficult and bloody to change it. I do not want something else equally untestable, however well it seems to fit the observations, to be as entrenched as old religious perspectives, especially if it wears the cloak of science without actually following the scientific method, as that could be even harder to undo than religion.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I always assumed it was the alcoholic beverage. This is unimportant.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
To be fair, Buddhism can have God(s). There are not very many restrictions on it. You can be an Atheist/Agnostic Buddhist (like me) or you can be a Christian Buddhist. I also kind of prefer the Hindi approach to Jesus. "Oh, him? Yeah, he is fine. Chuck him up on the wall with the rest of the gods if you want to."
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
There is plenty to test - there are new astrophysical tests of gravity, quark matter, etc., almost on a daily basis. (We still have never actually seen a black hole Event Horizon, for example - that should come in the next few years). What there may not be much more of is particle accelerators - if the LHC doesn't find anything beyond the Higgs Boson, I predict it will be very hard to raise money to make a, say, 100 km accelerator ring for another round of accelerator physics.
"between mathematics, physics, philosophy,"
and religion.
not based on empirical evidence: Religion.
Indeed, but from an academic/evolutionary perspective, the non-falsifiable guys have an advantage - they can produce publishable material without the expense of experiments. Plus, most people don't think science is Three-valued. So So, win again .
A scientific speculation is really just a plain old speculation. It is something that you wonder if it is true, but cannot test. I suppose the scientific part is if you have some hope that some person may eventually think of a way to test it.
Correct, however there is at least a phenomena, unlike string theory which has nothing.
Is it even a hypothesis if it's un-testable?
Non empirical physics sounds like a fucking joke.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There's plenty of new data coming, eventually - from the higher-energies in the LHC to the polarization of the CMBR, to the 'dark age" probes. But the physics of the small took a massive hit for over 20 years when the SCSC was cancelled, and it's sort of run wild. I do hope the inflation guys stop the circle jerk and look for ways to falsify one another's theories though - I doubt I'll see a CNBR probe in my lifetime (astronomy you can do a mile underground!), but surely there must be more data we can extract from the CMBR.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's not blowing anything up. It's just continuing to do what's been done for centuries. And there's tons of basic research being done. But it can't ALL be basic research. The statements of these two "leading researchers", George Ellis and Joseph Silk, sound a lot like axes being ground to me. Somebody lost a grant to someone else or didn't get the nice corner office and now they want to throw some colleagues under the bus. A lot of the people who work at that level have very thin skin.
The line between theoretical physics is very fine, and wiggles a whole lot. I've watched my mathematician wife navigate that line for a couple of decades. Often, you can look at the work of a theoretical physicist and a pure mathematician and there's not a nickel's difference between them. There not being the technical means to set up experiments is no reason to stop doing work.
I assure you, theoretical physicists and pure mathematicians (and applied mathematicians, for that matter) mostly don't care what department they're in. They just want to do their work.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Scientific theories are supposed to predict things. If they cannot (either because they deal with unobservable, like string theory, or with experiments that cannot be reproduced like big bang), they are more mythology than science.
The problem here is in the nature of the scope of the theory. Quite simply, currently beyond our ability to test it as a whole. So the alternative is to forecast outcomes of elements of it that can be tested. So no singular test to prove it but a whole range of tests to either prove or disprove elements of it's application. Rather like being able to see some one's face when you are blind by touching it with your finger tips, you do not ever see it but you infer it's appearance by contact made with your fingers and the relative positions they are in when you do so.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I for one welcome our new religious overlords, the Physicists...
I said you were ignorant for a long list of reasons - starting with you calling all non-commerical science "cargo cult", and going on to you silly little suggested spy tricks that would never work since they are designed to catch plagarists instead of frauds.
There were also newbie errors you made that showed you were unaware of what peer review actually was, so yes, the majority of readers on this site do have "insider knowledge" in comparison to the utter rubbish you are trying to inflict on us in your crusade against the "dread forces of innovation".
The highlight was how scientists and engineers are apparently destroying western civilization - I got a huge laugh out of that.
You could have just not posted and saved everyone the effort of ridiculing you. There's a lot more people going into string theory than loop quantum gravity. It's not because string theory has better explanatory power in the real world, but because there's more opportunity there for funding and such.
People who just to lab work should not be awarded PhDs. A PhD must have demonstrated ability to act as an independent researcher and come up with, as you put it, 'new' and 'innovative' things. Doesn't have to be Nobel-prize winning material, but it has to be at least somewhat interesting to someone versed in the field.
But I see this lab work-oriented phenomenon increasingly often in biology/medicine-related research. A supervisor/PI hands a lab protocol to a PhD student and they have to follow it to a T. Very little deviation or innovation is tolerated. In biology it's commonplace to treat PhD students like children.
Someone who's only job is to sit in a lab and collect data is not a PhD student. They are at best a lab technician. Problem is, you have to pay lab technicians actual salaries, so lots of labs use 'PhD students' as cheap labor.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
String theorists like to say they are doing math but actual mathematicians would disagree strongly with that. Mathematics is based around precision and rigor. Go into any math department in the country and say you consider string theory to be rigorous and precise. They'd either laugh or stare at you in horror. Seriously, try it.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
You said it quite well. There's nothing wrong with speculation and hypothesizing but when there's no way to test it then you run into problems.
In an ideal world, we'd be doing one of two things: Either putting in the required investment to test string theory, or not doing string theory and instead focusing on other problems.
I'd be the first person to defend fundamental and theoretical research, but I have to wonder if we really have a pressing NEED to do fundamental physics any more at this point. What about fusion energy or materials research?
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
what I mean is that more and more, there is a perception that for the *real* superstars in research, the job is coming up with wild ideas. The two criteria that a great idea must have are that it must be:
1) Radical, and
2) Internally logically and mathematically consistent
So long as these two criteria are met, the rewards seem to roll in. It's a version of postmodernist discourse/textual analysis; it's not about reference to anything outside the text, it's about the beautifully labyrinthine and provocative way in which the text (hypothesis, theory, etc.) is self-referential and self-consistent.
I'm not saying that PhDs and PhD students should be lab monkeys. I'm saying that more and more there's a perception that if you do have to touch a lab, ever, or if you do actually lower yourself to the point of carrying out "empirical research," it means that you're a couldn't-cut-it rather than a "superstar," i.e. a tier B or tier C scholar that has to operate in the realm of meat and matter, rather than in the realm of ideas.
Real "scholars" speculate beautifully about far out stuff in tremendously clever ways—or so goes the thinking, more and more. And I suspect the reason is because that is what is marketable from the attention and media standpoint. That's where the strong "branding" potential, for individual and for institution, lies. If you can get 50 people in a conerence session to yell at you for being an idiot misconstruing all of science and another 25 to call you the second coming of Albert Einstein (or some other prominent thinker), that's 75 more loud and attentive attendees than the guy down the hall with the methodological field innovation got for his session.
And if you can get covered in some national dead tree rag as a "controversial" scholar, your department tends to be thrilled and to put you front-and-center in their marketing materials.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Pathetic namedropping now of two people that do not back up your anti-science agenda at all.
You've refused to answer so far but I'll ask it again in a more direct way - what is it that has inspired you to go as deep into enemy territory as Slashdot and push an anti-science agenda? Are you one of those "social media marketing" types we keep hearing about - paid to bash science by some PR firm and thus reduce the influence of climate scientists when policy is considered. If not that, what brings someone like you to a place where nearly everyone respects a field you hate intensely? Why trade words with people you say are destroying western civilization?
you have subjective feeling evidence of god
that's not empirical evidence.
if that was empirical evidence, the cold fusion experiment would have been empirically proven
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
what is the difference (if any) between a "scientific hypothesis" and a "scientific speculation"?
My view is that a hypothesis is a very specific, testable/falsifiable claim. Speculation is an informal process which rhetorically or intellectually explores some unknown aspect of scientific endeavor, but it need not actually come up with hypotheses.
So... "speculation" definition: "a not testable/falsifiable (yet) hypothesis"? And you have to admit that this "My view is that" makes it a indefinite terminology!
makes a hypothesis about the universe that will be the first step *before* he tries to find if his hypothesis is falsifiable?
It's not a hypothesis until you have some way of theoretically determining to some degree whether it is true or false. Sure, you can make claims, which is a speculative activity, but you have to get to the point where you can think of theoretical ways to test those claims before they become hypotheses.
Is the process of *trying to find* "theoretical ways to test claims" part of the "scientific method" (i.e., even before the "from hypothesis/es to theory" process)?
I KNOW WHAT A HYPOTHESIS IS (even a scientific!): it is a speculation! Either we discuss about Greek or science! Right?
It doesn't sound like you did actually, but I hope the above post helped.
Well, i do know - it is many things i don't know (most things actually...), but this, i do know! In any case, yes, you are helpful.
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
A scientific speculation is really just a plain old speculation. It is something that you wonder if it is true, but cannot test. I suppose the scientific part is if you have some hope that some person may eventually think of a way to test it.
So, when someone (e.g., a scientist) is in the process of examining and/or trying to find if this "(plain old) speculation" can be testable/falsifiable (so it can be "upgrade" from "speculation" to "hypothesis"!) is that science or not? I understand that i over-react to this "hypothesis vs speculation" thing (or that i cause it - an anonymour wrote to me: "and this is why the world is going to shit. All the smart people are arguing about stupid stuff"!), but it is related to the story (science and the "scientific method" without the "empirical method") and i think that our basic terminology is problematic and still indefinite - my opinion is that your "(plain old) speculation" is just a "(plain old) potentially testable/falsifiable hypothesis", but calling it "speculation" (which is not even a definite term - you are the only who tried to define it for me, everyone else told me what a hypothesis is... ) we try to "purify science" by excluding the first step of the scientific method, i.e., hypothesizing about the hypothesis!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
and this is why the world is going to shit. All the smart people are arguing about stupid stuff.
That was my fault, and i am not so smart, so...!
But in any case: good (and definite) terminology IS good (and definite...) science.
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
..and continue climbing or build a ladder to see higher.
the problem with theological truths is that they can be anything anyone in a closed room came up with. they pretend there's rules or inner truths, but really it's all worth the same.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Antisthenes, as you describe his stance, sounds basically worthless, because he limits his philosophy to analytic truths, and by a Aristotelian definition as well.
When we can't even decide if science must be based on empirical processes, and if we can synthesize the scientific truth from non-empirical knowledge... then Antisthenes becomes a not so bad adviser!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
A "scientific hypothesis" starts as potentially falsifiable - my "criticism" (and/or question) was about the difference (if any) between the terms "speculation" and hypothesis.
A hypothesis that is not testable or falsifiable is a belief. Whether that belief is about a deity or abstract theory, doesn't matter.
Is that an accepted terminology from scientists? Because since a belief can exist either with or without knowledge of the truth, a belief can be a scientific truth - i understand your point, but you don't understand why i try so hard to understand what is the difference (if any) between a "hypothesis" and a "speculation" (i don't find any!).
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
It was just an example of empirical knowledge (that may be reproducible by anyone WHO IS RELIGIOUS by the way) - i made it clear that it is not scientific knowledge, so a scientific method can not be used to scientificaly reproduce the observations.
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
"empirical knowledge of God"
you're a deluded idiot
come back to us when you find your way out of that cave
Come back to me when you have some scientificaly empirical method to prove me wrong...
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Figuring out how to test a speculation is certainly science.
Really, your question gets to the heart of the matter. Boiled down, TFA expresses concern that physicists are no longer distinguishing between speculation and hypothesis themselves, nor are they appropriately concerned for falsifiability.
Note that there is nothing wrong with speculation. The wrong is in forgetting that it is merely speculation.
1) hypothesis is something more than just speculation. +, under your thesis, that is, your basis for an argument/theory
The "hypo" in the "hypo-thesis" does not mean "under (the thesis)" (i.e., as a basis) in this case, but "less (of a thesis)" (i.e., it is not a thesis... yet!) - many hypotheses may exist at the same time, until one (or none!) becomes a thesis (i.e., theory).
2) translated *from* greek, not to.
Yes, you are right, thanks - i stuggle with my English, and translating English to Greek and back to English...!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Since the scientific method for a scientific theory starts with a scientific hypothesis (everything in bold is Greek - i am a Greek by the way) i don't understand why it is "bad form" or "abuse of the terminology" - "hypothesis" is translated to Greek as "speculation" and a "scientific hypothesis" is a (scientific) speculation.
That's quite normal, and the biggest problem of all fields, not just physics. To describe things precisely, instead of inventing terminology and providing a definition, words from normal everyday-languages are used, and defined to have a special meaning. It could be argued that it is something that just happend out of convenience, people working in a field were (ab)using the specific terms out of laziness. I prefer to think of it as protective, as a means to keep outsides out and laugh of them when they are not aware of field-specific meanings of terms.
Scientists should know at least 2 languages (one of them preferably Greek... or Latin, if they are not good enough!) - then they could understand that a hypothesis is a speculation! Again, from my sig: Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names."
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
No my friend: i have empirical evidence of God (that i can reproduce... and even observe with other people!), but they are not *scientifically* empirical evidence (so you need to be a religious person -not just a scientist!- to do the "experiments") - i understand that this may upset some people, but 1+1=2... even if i claim something else!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Even generally accepted theories have not really been fully verified. Has the gravitational constant and the speed of light been measured everywhere in the universe by scientitsts? No. Have we measured that it actually remains constant along the full timeline of the universe? No. For all we know, gravitational force might reverse direction tomorrow, due to some unknown mechanism we are not aware of - because we have had no opportunity to observe it (yet).
There is no reason to believe that physical laws have to only be related to things that can be directly observed. A theory which involves higher dimensions may very well be the right one. The litmus test is whether it explains all the causes and effects that we are actually able to observe - and then one can turn to studies on what class of alternative theories may exist that would yield the same observable results.
It's in Wales. I went there once.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Figuring out how to test a speculation is certainly science.
Good - now we have to find a nice Greek word for that phase of the scientific method, because that barbaric "speculation" thing sounds.... barbaric!
Really, your question gets to the heart of the matter. Boiled down, TFA expresses concern that physicists are no longer distinguishing between speculation and hypothesis themselves, nor are they appropriately concerned for falsifiability.
I am glad you understand that i don't just try to play etymological games because i am a Greek (well, i do in some ways, but only because of my first part of my signature - and it is a good game to play!).
Note that there is nothing wrong with speculation. The wrong is in forgetting that it is merely speculation.
No problem with me my friend (and of course i prefer testable/falsifiable statements in science - since i am religious, in some other comments i made some reference to religion claiming that i have empirical knowledge of God, but i made clear that it is not *scientifically* empirical knowledge) - but many people think that a speculation is not part of science, even when someone speculates and/or examines the speculation in a quest for the scientific truth. So, i am serious dude: we need a Greek term... we can't advance science without Greek!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
The phenomena for string theory is the lack of unification in the four fundamental forces. Because scientists observed 'hey, we can't really explain all of these things without multiple theories' and they figured the universe would only have one theory, they set out to make a theory that explained what they needed explained. Enter string theory.
Compare that with dark matter, where scientists went and said 'hey, we don't really know why these galaxies aren't shaped like we think they ought to be' and went on to make a theory that explained what they needed explaining. Their origins are effectively the same.
He thinks everyone else is.
Because he's Greek (you might have noticed he mentions that occasionally) and therefore has dominion over all long fancy words.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So... "speculation" definition: "a not testable/falsifiable (yet) hypothesis"? And you have to admit that this "My view is that" makes it a indefinite terminology!
It makes my interpretation a subjective terminology which is indefinite in a particular way. But that's the point of me reminding you.
And no, I didn't say that was the definition of speculation. For example, a common avenue of speculation is discussion new experiment design or improving existing equipment. For example, if we were able to do LHC-level experiments (comparable energy level and beam intensity) with a device that costs three orders of magnitude less, then we could speculate on what sort of experiments that would allow or the quantity of data that would generate. None of that generates new hypotheses.
Hypothesis building is beyond scientific speculation. You have to do a significant amount of work just to get to the point where you can create hypotheses and perhaps much more work to get to the point where you can test or attempt to falsify such hypotheses.
All your points was good enough (and please don't think that i disagree with you - i just try to find a good answer for myself!), but i have some problems with a) terminology (what is the definite definition (!) of "-scientific- speculation"?) b) excluding the "speculation" phase from the "scientific method" (because that phase is without any empirical evidence) creates a "gray area" where something may or may not be scientific examination, plus (and even more important maybe): that phase DOES generates new hypotheses and/or contributes to a specific hypothesis with more than just -how to say it...- "speculations" (for the "thesis"/theory and/or the hypotheses themselves by "hypothesizing about the hypotheses"). I understand that in some level we must decide how to differentiate a not (yet) testable/falsifiable hypothesis (a -less important- issue of terminology - i advocate to use a nice Greek term for that phase, if we want to differentiate from "hypothesis", since "speculation" sounds... barbaric!), but we still can't even decide what is "science" (so we need articles in the NY Times from top researchers, like the one of this /. story). Anyway... i always believed that we need definite terms for such things, and i believe that we still don't have them!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
In science the word hypothesis as a specific meaning. Speculation doesn't have a defined meaning. In other contexts, other definitions may apply.
So: a "speculation" is actually a "hypothesis"?
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
You first problem here is that you think that the word used is Greek just because is sounds like and is spelled exactly like the Greek one. In every language there are words like that, etymologically they can be traced to a language they were borrowed from but as they were brought into another language it adopted a different meaning. Hypothesis in English does not mean the same thing as Hypothesis in Greek.
You would have to excuse me but: i know Greek (i am Greek!) and (some bad) English, plus (i think that) i understand what a *scientific* hypothesis is (it means the same thing is means in Greek: hypothesis!!!) - so, this is not (just) an etymological debate, but something that has to do with my signature: Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." (please notice the *wisdom* word - and then read again the /. story!)
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
That kind of "empiricism" (I think you're misusing the word "empirical") is scientifically meaningless.
Yes, my empiricism (i will use this word since you understand it - i was afraid to use it because of my bad English!) is scientifically meaningless (i already wrote: "of course it is un-scientific knowledge/statement, and i can't use a scientific method to prove my claim").
You claim empirical knowledge of a god, let's call him God A. If I claim empirical knowledge of some God B where it is obvious that A =/= B, how are you going to argue with me? You can't. This is what makes religion unscientific. There is no common ground of reproducible observation and experiment.
I agree with you (and it is theologically meaningless to argue about God A and God B since God = God!) - that is why i support my *NON-scientific* theological empiricism!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Just a comment for that "you can be a Christian Buddhist" (since i am the Greek Orthodox Christian the GP was replied to) for those that may disagree with you: i am a (Greek Orthodox) Christian "Buddhist"... so, yes, you can be that kind of a Buddhist - of course you understand that i believe in (the living) God, but i don't find it theologicaly incompatible to accept "worldly" Buddhist truths.
I just wanted to support what you wrote, and maybe save some naive Buddhists who may think that they have to choose between heaven or earth!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
we can't advance science without Greek!
Agreed :-) I will have to leave that to you.
Is that a nice way of saying, "Old and in the way"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Agreed on most points. But in fact most of the grand ideas are falsifiable. Eventually. A hypothesis beyond current reach is no less a hypothesis, but must be treated with more skepticism than one that has been tested, more than once preferably. Gamma ray observations looking for evidence of quantum foam are an example of creative testing via observation. Frankly I think this is a fascinating time to be watching the field.
Now you're just waffling. You aren't related to that rubber faced twat of a finance minister, are you?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For a physical analogue, if everything we know about the speed of light is correct, there is no way to ever observe what is inside a black hole. Yet obviously there is something inside.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Why would you assume that there is anything inside of a black hole? Because of the extreme gravity? If the speed of gravity is equal to the speed of light, then nothing inside of the black hole is causing the gravity to exist... which means that the gravity felt outside of the black hole has nothing to do with anything inside of the black hole as the gravity can not propagate fast enough to escape; therefore, there is not evidence that anything even exists inside of the black hole.
No?
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
In scientific language I believe what you are referring to is called "conjecture", but i might be wrong. A hypothesis must be falsifiavle.
That first post will all the "cargo-cult" bullshit, the silly spy stuff that would never work and probably about half your stream of shit in the long and pointless thread. "Destroying western civilization" for one thing. What manner of creature are you?
What makes you such an expert despite an obvious lack of science education in high school and no effort to catch up since?
Now you're just waffling. You aren't related to that rubber faced twat of a finance minister, are you?
Every Greek is related to each other!
By the way: while he (Varoufakis) is more known to "barbarians" like you because of his exposure to international media, much worse than him exist in our current goverment... people that we Greeks have the "privilege to enjoy" all by ourselves - just think that Varoufakis is NOT a member of the parties currently in power! I believe (and hope) that this goverment will be out of power in a couple of months (we already started to talk about elections in Greece).
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
In scientific language I believe what you are referring to is called "conjecture", but i might be wrong. A hypothesis must be falsifiavle
You are not wrong (except of this "must"!?)... but neither i am! My problem and criticism is the "hard" science's indefinite terminology (e.g., a "conjecture" is a term mostly used in Math... and in Physics' Math!). Think this: how you call a "conjecture" in German/Slavic/Greek*? And you may understand how problematic is to have indefinite terminology for basic phases of the "scientific method" (i.e., from "hypothesis" to "theory").
* i don't just mean how you translate the natual language word, but what term is used for this phase (which is a hypothesis without a formal proof... right? if you reply, at least try to give me an English definition for a "-scientific- conjecture" that will cover all "hard" science domains!)
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
1) No it doesn't.
2) The "ble" suffix already implies potential, e.g. habitable, edible, portable. It doesn't imply that, at this moment, someone actually lives there, eats it, or carries it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think the ternary world you describe, with its "not yet decided" area between the fully checked and the fully disproved zones, is something perfectly reasonable. I remember seeing it described in a french 'colloque de Cerisy' about complexity in the 80's.
The not yet decided zone is the most interesting territory, because its frontier is permanently moving, people continuously creating paths through it to 'extract' new verified or disproved items.
It's the main activity of Science to create these paths.
What is more worrying in the op, or at least the way we discuss it here, is the consideration of a part of the undecided zone as a 'will never be decidable but still so nice it sounds convincing', and the items in it becoming truths just because of that.
What is questioned here is the way you circulate around and through the frontier: up to now, the only vehicle was verification.
Now for some cosmologists, or so we are told, being a simpler or nicer idea would become enough.
This, if true, is a concern to me.
Not really because of Cosmology, btw : I can still remain sceptical there -more because, as some remarked, then any religion will postulate similar truths.
Herve S.
Ah, I found the reference: colloque de Cerisy, l'auto-organisation ('self-organizing'), presentation from the mathematician Maurice Milgram about the formalisms of randomness, and the associated discussion. 1981. I was a cool young student at the time ;-)
Milgram probably elaborated more on it since then; but I remember he indeed draw the three-zones diagram, in a very cool manner...
Herve S.
Er, I think no indeed: you have to consider both space and time, and the black hole inner mass does deform the surrounding space (indeed that's how we do measure black hole masses)
It remains true that matter or information cannot escape, although some consider that for info the powerfull emissions happening when matter is torn just before the horizon does send back information...
H.
Herve S.
"Dark matter" isn't a hand wave. Dark Matter is the general name for the problem of "what's this stuff that makes up the missing matter we observe in the universe?" It's not an explanation. It's a question.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Every hypothesis (theory, speculation, faith, whatever you want to call it) doesn't resolve into being true or false. They resolve into true, false, or cannot be determined.
Can you prove "true?" I thought you could only prove "not false with error bars," with tiny, tiny error bars being very close to true. True perhaps being "the limit as the p-value -> 0." Which is why we say a hypothesis must be "falsifiable" rather than "provable."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
This is why I dislike Dark Matter (the concept, not the new TV show).
We can't observe or measure it, however our calculations don't add up, so whatever doesn't make sense we're going to call it "Dark Matter"...
Okdokie then!
i always believed that we need definite terms for such things, and i believe that we still don't have them!
Where's the need? And how much room for improvement is there to be had? The biggest problems in science are due to ignorance or conflict of interest, neither which is magically helped by slightly more definite terms.
I understand that in some level we must decide how to differentiate a not (yet) testable/falsifiable hypothesis (a -less important- issue of terminology - i advocate to use a nice Greek term for that phase, if we want to differentiate from "hypothesis", since "speculation" sounds... barbaric!), but we still can't even decide what is "science" (so we need articles in the NY Times from top researchers, like the one of this /. story).
There's also "claim" and "statement" for stuff that doesn't meet the criteria of a hypothesis. It's covered. As to what is and isn't science, it's just not that important when we can judge by outcome rather than by process. It's also worth noting that few scientists actually follow a very formal process.
TL;DR version: there isn't that much to gain from more rigorously defining basic scientific terms.
It's a question of the same kind that we asked at the end of the 19th Century: "If light is more a wave than a particle, then what's it a wave in?" Hence, the invocation of a hypothetical medium called luminiferous aether.
I think epicycles had gotten a bad rep.
They're just the easier math of a Sun-centered system in a harder Earth-centered frame of reference. The fact that it worked (well) has always impressed me.
With science, replacing long-held and very well-tested parts of theories seems to take decades, no longer. Einstein's theories were very hard to test at the time, and undermined the classical ideas of space and time. Quantum mechanics undermined the idea of causality, and Einstein never did accept that. Currently, a random physicist will understand relativity and quantum mechanics, and will have no problem thinking in terms of spacetime and the Uncertainty Principle.
Einstein's scientific reputation after 1905 was heavily based on his explanation of the photoelectric effect, and if he hadn't written that paper, or the one on Brownian motion, his reputation would have been something like Fleischmann and Pons currently. It may be that they did find something new and important, and if so they'll eventually have credit for it (like Mendel, who worked in isolation and published in an extremely obscure journal).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A gap in physical theory is not the same as a discrepancy between currently understood physics and observations. In the case of dark matter, scientists observed that galactic rotation curves worked as predicted if there was a lot of diffuse matter they couldn't detect. This established a structure in which dark matter had to fit, and suggested other observations to confirm or refute the theory. There also is an obvious candidate for dark matter: something like neutrinos, but heavy and slow.
In the case of string theory, scientists looked at a gap between two areas of physics that had to be unified somehow (we figure physics has to be consistent, although different aspects will be significant under different circumstances). Since there's no promising discrepancies between quantum mechanics or general relativity and what we observe, there was no such structure, and what we wound up with was hard or impossible to test. In particular, string theory made few hard predictions, since it's more like a large collection of theories than one theory.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In the case of the luminiferous aether, scientists immediately began to try to figure out some of its properties. It ran into problems immediately: it had to be extremely rigid to allow light to move so fast, and still allow things like planets to move through it without retardation. What eventually killed it was that a major prediction, variations in the observed speed of light based on travel through the aether, failed.
Dark matter was hypothesized to explain galactic rotation curves, and again scientists tried to figure out its properties, and use what it had to be to make predictions. In fact, they made predictions that turned out to be correct (we can detect gravitational lensing, even when we can't detect any conventional matter there), and it turned out to solve a question of quantum mechanics nicely. As far as I know, there has been no detection of an individual particle of dark matter, but we can detect the stuff in large quantities.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Reality trumps theory, every time. And now, I've got Dr. Jane's "The Empirical Strikes Back" stuck in my brain, from her album "Whackademia". (It was distributed through filk channels, so it may be hard to find.)
Post-mortem credit is no doubt of great comfort to the rotting corpses of once-ridiculed scientists, but it does nothing to ease the practical difficulties and discomfort of having a promising career destroyed.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
TL;DR version: there isn't that much to gain from more rigorously defining basic scientific terms.
My answer... in bold!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
No, I'm asking why you've written so many long posts expressing how superior you are on these topics without actually telling us what makes you superior to the people who are actually in such a field or at least have a high school level understanding of the field - something you are unencumbered by which somehow gives you a vast amount more insight as a complete outsider.
What makes you so much better than all those lesser mortals that work with science and technology?
Your very long list of posts attacking entire professions speaks for itself and the message is very clear that you consider yourself a far better person than any of those untrustworthy professions like science and engineering - so why do you consider your own profession superior?
Since you failed to prove your point, no, nothing like it, just an entirely ignorable off-topic stream of insults that marks you as more of a failure with each and every zero-content post.
You put up the bullshit and it failed to test as anything else - utter failure by any measure other than word count.