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Physicists (String Theorists) and Philosophers Debate the Scientific Method
StartsWithABang writes: One of the most damning, albeit accurate, condemnations of String Theory that has been leveled at it is that it's untestable, non-empirical, and offers no concrete predictions or methods of falsification. Yet some have attempted to address this failing not by coming up with concrete predictions or falsifiable tests, but by redefining what is meant by theory confirmation. Many physicists and philosophers have jumped into this debate, and a recently completed workshop has produced no agreements, but lots of interesting perspectives being live blogged by a physicist. Also weighing in is a philosopher in three separate parts.
When it comes to the "scientific method", you may be surprised that it's more useful and illuminating to query the philosopher than the scientist.
You are welcome on my lawn.
String theorists are not physicists. They are mathturbators, at best.
If those are scare quotes then yes it would be more useful and illuminating to talk to the philosopher. Otherwise I'd advise to ask the scientist, since their profession is (supposed to be) an implementation of the scientific method. Daily usage means they will be generally better at it.
And it's a construction worker's profession to implement an architect's design, but I wouldn't ask a construction worker to design my skyscraper.
The scientific method is a philosophical construct more than a scientific one.
You are welcome on my lawn.
While the philosophers have a point, it is highly unlikely any breakthroughs in fundamental science will be made by someone educated purely in academic philosophy.
Neither is qualified to comment. String theorists aren't scientists, and philosophers have never said anything of value.
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy. Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history. It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
Gross proposed to distinguish among frameworks, theories, and models. Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and string “theory” are not theories, but rather frameworks. Theories are something like Newton’s or Einstein’s theory of gravity, or the unfortunately named Standard “Model.” Theories can be tested, frameworks not so much. Models include the BCS model of superconductivity, or BSM (Beyond Standard Model) models.
Unfortunately classical mechanics and quantum mechanics can and have been tested. Frameworks in his definition seem to be multiple applications of the same fundamental, physical principles to different situations. These can easily be tested and, for two of the examples given, have been. Then we get gems like:
According to Gross, since physical phenomena scale as the log(energy), physicists can extrapolate theory to very high energy. Unfortunately, experiments scale only as energy^2, which means that they cannot easily be extrapolated to very high energy.
which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Just off the top of my head there are the corrections to the Higgs mass which scale as energy squared (which is theory) and I've no idea what it means to say that an experiment scales with energy-squared since, for many experiments, increasing the energy is irrelevant and for others, e.g. a linear accelerator, the energy increases linearly with size.
I think the implication is that the scientific method may not be the best approach to uncover the manner in which the scientific method behaves.
That is a great example of begging the question.
The scientific method is entirely unnecessary to decide whether to step off of a tall building. People knew not do do that before the scientific method was codified.
You don't have to codify the method of study to use it. People who discovered the effects of falling off tall buildings WERE using the scientific method whether or not they were aware of that fact at the time.
This is pretty deep water so I could have missed the point but it seems like there are two sets of discussions talking past each other: what constitutes a valid theory and what constitutes a reason to develop a particular speculative theory where nothing empirically relevant exists. To me a theory is a tool - it predicts outcomes. Any number of theories can be useful but we successively replace less complete with more complete theories based on their ability to predict. Theories are tools not truth. The discussion here seems to be whether string theorists are delusional in working on their 'framework' when there is no usable theory to emerge. What constitutes the proof such work is useful. Maybe the philosophers can help them frame this discussion beyond instinct and notions of beauty. This is a search a truth they hope will point the way someday to a theory.
Do you think it's a dick-measuring contest?
Science is about the testable. Math (and logic) is about the provable. Philosophy is about the more fundamental questions.
You may say "I know X to be true". That raises 3 fundamental questions without easy answers:
* What does "I" mean - Theory of Identity
* What does "know" mean - Theory of Knowledge (epistemology)
* What does "true" mean - Meta-Logic
Science is certainly practical. Philosophy rarely is. But philosophy does highlight how little we really know, despite our ever-growing skill at the practical. And it's worth remembering that every field of science started as philosophy, and only with the tools and the mindset did it eventually become practical, become science.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy. Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history. It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
And I will add that the most influential recent philosopher on the practice of science was a physicist himself: Percy Bridgman. In this landmark work The Logic of Modern Physics Bridgman clarified ideas about what it means to observe or measure something.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
This method is used during the development of a theory and is based on collecting indications which increase the physicists’ confidence that a theory describes nature. These indications are, for example, the amount (or absence of) alternative solutions to a problem, the degree by which a theory is connected to already confirmed theories, and the amount of unexpected insights that the theories give rise to.
However, the reason you should read the article is because it manages to reasonably work this image into the discussion.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If String Theory makes no testable predictions, then why was I just reading this, over at AAAS? FTA:
Working with a few lasers and mirrors, physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, have been trying to test a wild idea from string theory: that our universe may be like an enormous hologram.
The full article from Science is paywalled. Is this just an instance of clueless science writing?
I can see the fnords!
The scientific method requires that a hypothesis make definite predictions that can, in principle, be tested and falsified. As long as there are definite predictions that can be falsified, it's a valid hypothesis. Whether we have the ability to test that hypothesis at the present time or near future isn't relevant to its validity as a hypothesis. There are plenty of hypotheses that couldn't be tested when they were developed but have later been tested and are very useful to us today. General relativity was tested in 1919 but the outcome was pure luck because of the limits of the instruments. It wasn't verified properly until decades later. Yet general relativity is very important to us today because we have to take into account relativistic effects for things like GPS to work properly. Just because we can't test something now doesn't mean it's not useful.
If string theory makes no definite predictions, then it's not a valid hypothesis. However, if there are no definite predictions, it also has no actual impact on how we observe the universe to behave, and therefore isn't worth our time. If, however, it does make definite predictions. then it may have impacts on us in the future that we can't anticipate right now. Einstein had no way of knowing about GPS when he proposed general relativity. Because we haven't tested string theory, it's not a theory at all. If it makes definite predictions that we haven't tested, it's a hypothesis. There's nothing wrong with that, because all theories begin as hypotheses.
However, calling something a theory implies it's been tested and the observations fit the predictions that the theory makes. If string theory doesn't make any definite predictions that, even in principle, could be tested and shown to be false, it can never be a theory because it can't even be a hypothesis. That would effectively relegate string theory to the realms of things like intelligent design and young Earth creationism.
Do you think it's a dick-measuring contest?
Don't attribute your misunderstanding of the issue to me (I am guessing that you have misunderstood it because your examples are not relevant to the relationship between the scientific method and philosophy, but instead look like an attempt to claim an extra couple of mm for philosophy.)
As for ignorance, humanity had no idea of how much it did not know until science got going.
While I am a dyed in the wool empiricist, and firmly believe in the fundamental importance of understanding the Universe in terms of what we can observe about it... the Universe does not give us any guarantees that a correct mathematical model of its structure necessarily must produce specific observable confirmation.
Or, perhaps observable confirmations are possible in principle but will never be observable in practice. For example, any experimental confirmation that requires direct manipulation of a super massive black hole is not going to happen, unless we get lucky and can find a natural experiment that meets the requirements.
We cannot lay down requirements of how the Universe must behave. It is what it is, and we must learn how to deal with it.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I hereby award "Science" the Awesome Trophy for being the most awesomest awesome that ever awesomed. Are you satisfied?
But is the scientific method a tool to discover what is true? Is truth the same as "ever more accurate and predictive models"? It's not a scientific question.
As for ignorance, humanity had no idea of how much it did not know until science got going.
Socrates once said that the only wisdom he had was in understanding how little he knew. What do you say today? How much do we not know ? How could you even answer such a question? It's not a scientific question.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Science is certainly practical. Philosophy rarely is
In fairness, many fields of science started out as philosophy.
As an easy example of the practical results of philosophy, we can point to our democratic systems (Utopia by Sir Thomas More is my favorite example of political philosophy).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
CEOs know this. Marketers know this. The EASIEST way to get a scientist in your pocket is to threaten their paycheck if the results dont support the product being sold. So more often than not, what you see in scientific journals and publications through 'credible' sources is skewed science to sell something....
Even in educational institutions. Who do you think pays for the grants?
On a similar note though...
The Japanese have a process called Kaizen - which is code for incremental improvement.
Like ants building an anthill, or bees building a beehive, the workers do not know nor are they given awareness of what's being built. They are, after all, drones, and are given enough information to do their specific job and nothing more.
So what are you building, humans?
The scientific method, in it's current incarnation, largely supports the benefit of the organization it supports. When there's a failure in what the scientific method is leveraged for or the organization dependent on it, it is actually not that terrifically difficult to draw lines for who the failure benefited and how. Follow that 'up the chain' and find out what's really going on....
Perceptual "Corruption" and Failure" in the people and processes is largely there to entice people to continue focusing on the minutia - the details, and to overwhelm them with too much information which prevents them from looking at or understanding the big picture.
Herein lies the fundamental flaw with the scientific method in use today.
It quite literally prevents major breakthroughs because the mindset of those 'testing' are looking for flaws in their details rather than supportive evidence of the breakthrough.
Belief creates reality.
And if you're hyper focused on trying to generate enough energy to break through that last 1/10 of 1/10 of 1/10 of 1/10 of a meter per second to break the speed of light, which is nearly infinite energy, you'll never understand there's more to breaking the speed of light than nearly infinite supply of energy alone ;-)
That's Q's hint of the day for breaking the speed of light .
mua ha ha.
And it's a construction worker's profession to implement an architect's design, but I wouldn't ask a construction worker to design my skyscraper.
The scientific method is a philosophical construct more than a scientific one.
I am not sure I would, generally, agree with scientific method being a philosophical construct before a scientific one, based on the reference.com dictionary definition of "Scientific Method":
"a method of research in which a problem is identified, relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formulated from these data, and the hypothesis is empirically tested."
The philosopher will sit back and think about things, possibly describing a problem in a form that can be addressed by someone other than another philosopher. But the scientist will define the bounds of the problem as (generally) measurable features, gather data and formulate hypotheses, leading to the empirical testing of those hypotheses.
However, where String Theory is concerned, I do agree that what we call "Scientific Method" in relation to the theory is a philosophical exercise, due to the difficulty in actually doing any of the data gathering and empirical testing.
The edge case/boundary between the two would be a thought experiment, similar to many that Einstein engaged in when formulating his theories around Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. The difference between those and String Theory though, is that we have found other ways to validate those theories by applying them to situations that allow prediction, experiment and measurement for comparison to the models that arose from the thought experiments.
I would love to see a similar evolution with String Theory, but until we can measure, test and experiment I cannot see String Theory as anything more than a philosophical exercise.
There's a wasted education and a useless job title.
Can we rename string theory as string philosophy? Since it's not even a hypothesis yet?
Please?
-
But is the scientific method a tool to discover what is true? Is truth the same as "ever more accurate and predictive models"? It's not a scientific question
No, that is correct. The scientific method is a method of determining if something is possibly true, and then rate the truthfulness. For example, we can use the scientific method and analyze the evolution of species and conclude that it's "probably" true. We have not witnessed it so have no "proof", but the evidence we have seems to indicate that it's not only possible but probable. The more evidence we have, the more accurate the scientific method becomes.
Socrates once said that the only wisdom he had was in understanding how little he knew.
A bit simple, but works. He actually said that the Oracle of Delphi told him he was the wisest person in the world, and that the gods tasked him to find someone wiser (which he never could).
What do you say today? How much do we not know ? How could you even answer such a question? It's not a scientific question.
At great risk to my Karma I'll point out that Science has become a Religion. As a several decades long student of Philosophy, I find that many people claiming to be scientific and atheists trust certain scientific theories just like a holy book. You have your evangelists attempting to convert believers in other faiths to their ways of thinking, and even have the zealots trying to make other Religions illegal.
Given that some questions are only Philosophical, such as the beginning of the Universe, you get similar answers to a formal Theology. "Philosophy" is taught to be a dirty word to the "science" religion, they can be as impossible to debate as any theological believer.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Massimo Pigliucci did a very nice blog of the Conference, with separate posts for day 1, 2 and 3.
There is also Joseph Polchinski's String theory to the rescue paper, which has a ridiculously bad probabilistic argument in Section 3. (Peter Woit thought it was a joke, but apparently not.)
For myself, I favor loop quantum gravity, which as far as I can tell wasn't represented at the conference at all.
"Science existed before Philosophy. Science is learning."
Only if you game "science" to mean what you want to mean.
"Science is learning."
That's exactly what I mean. Do you know what the ethymology of the word "philosophy" is? It comes from the Greek "philos sophia" which means "knowledge's friend". It is philosophy which is learning, not science. What ancient Greeks did was not science, it was philosophy. And because what they did was philosophy, not science, they put in the same ground the guy that said the Sun was in the middle of the Universe with the one that said it was the Earth, or that's why they didn't see any gross difference between talking about shadows casted by the sun over a pole and those casted by a fire within a cave.
And it was because science was not "invented" by an Eureka! moment but developed through quite a long time starting more or less on Galileo, that Newton still shared his time between apples falling from trees and angels blowing planets around.
All science started out as philosophy and many major breakthroughs in science were philosophy for decades or centuries before technology got to the point to be validate the philosophy into theory.
There are different takes on the scientific method. Poppers view is the gold standard but there others like Feyerabend, (from whom I could myself attend lectures as a student at ETH) who similar than Lacatos had a more liberal point of view: science also allows chaotic, anarchistic developments. The hype of parallel universes is maybe just the troll which is needed to value what is science really is and what is just speculation or belief. Similarly as political trolls, they remind us what values we really should treasure. History has shown that also unscientific approaches were motivational. Spiritual approaches for example were driving mathematicians from Pythagoreans to Kepler. Historically they had value as a motivator, even so one knows now that most of these believes were nonsense: Keplers harmonices mundi for example was one of these heavenly ideas which today just look plain silly and have lost all their scientific value. The other work which was produced (Kepler's laws) is a gem. Talking about parallel universes is maybe a bit like the Cretan Epimenides telling that All Cretans are liars or Russels set of all sets which are not subsets of themselves. These paradoxa have been resolved by setting up set theory carefully and using precise nomenclature what a set is. Any theory of the universe needs good definitions first of all. A notion of a universe which which does contain more than we can access, is strange. While liars paradoxa have initially been intended as jokes or trolls, they turned out to be a central idea for Goedel when working on incompleteness results. Also on the positive side, books about parallel universes have produced interest in the public about science. With the eyes of Feyerabend, we should see it as anarchism. Compare it with Keplers harmonices mundi. Maybe there is some nice mathematics or eventially some physics coming out it which will remain valuable. There could be a much simpler explanation: it might also simply be a way to gain publicity, get grant. Parallel universes just inspire our imagination, as countless many science fiction books have shown. An nice example is Ruckers "Mathemticians in Love" in which parallel universes play a role.
Philosophy is not the scientific method, but philosophy is where the scientific method comes from.
A=B does not mean A=C.
This discussion is a very clear example of why people should not be able to get a college degree with out taking a few years of philosophy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
String theory is a scam
I have bad news for you: you will not find *the* Truth in philosophy either, though you may find a number of different definitions of the word.
It turns out that knowledge is a pretty good alternative.
If you can't prove your conclusion, remove the requirement for a provable theory.
Philanthropists beware, turning points in history sometimes take time to dispense wisdom.
Particles which seem to form from nothing most likely came from something.
What is light in a vacuum when pressures have been measured coming _from_ vacuums?
Stick with old fashioned science or risk the perils of those without merit gaining 'clout'.
'String' together a theory with scientific merit, then you have a scientific theory.
Not the other way around.
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy.
Actually, more accurately, science -- since about 1950 -- tends to ignore a lot of the interesting insights that philosophy of science tends to offer. Hence your citation of a guy who died decades ago, rather than a lot of the stuff that has happened since.
Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history.
A few things here:
If Popper's ideas weren't very interesting or innovative, why does his idea of falsificationism get cited on Slashdot as the foundation of science all the time? How precisely do you think scientists formulated this idea before Popper? Answer -- they didn't. If you look at how science was practiced in the late 1800s, you'll see a lot more haphazard theorizing, the nature of mathematical models and statistics in relation to causality and significance was less formalized, and while people spoke in terms of "hypotheses" and "theories," it wasn't discussed in the way people on Slashdot talk about it today.
Popper's falsificationism developed out of a philosophical movement called logical positivism, which had tremendous influence on lots of people in the first half of the 20th century who were looking into the nature of the foundations of mathematics and science, the nature of "proof," etc. Stuff like Godel's incompleteness theorem came out of this.
But the scientific outlook was fundamentally changed as the nature of causality and explanation was invoked, rather than simple description.
With this heavier empirical burden, people like Popper criticized some of these concepts while offering new ideas about formulating hypotheses. If you think scientists just "intuited" the idea of falsifiability before Popper, you obviously haven't read a lot of science writing in the generations before him. Yes, some scientists were basically doing falsificationism, but Popper formalized the idea, and thus it caught on as a standard way of considering the validity of empirical methodology.
Of course, the naive view of falsificationism as usually presented by people on Slashdot isn't actually how science works, and Popper recognized this. He didn't believe that's how science advanced -- his theories were actually quite complex. And others followed in critiquing and coming up with new ways that more accurately reflects how science actually advances -- you get various perspectives from people like Kuhn, Lakatos, and even the wacky Feyerabend. And now we're only up to 1970 or so. Philosophers of science have had a lot more interesting things to say in the past 45 years too.
It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
And you may say, "But it's philosophy! Who cares?!"
The thing is -- science doesn't actually work according to the oversimplified "scientific method" or according to pseudo-Popperian naive falsificationism. It's a lot more complicated, and it has a lot of methodological flaws. Philosophers of science identified many of these in the 1950s through 1970s, but scientists by then had stopped reading philosophy journals. Instead, this naive empiricism led to all sorts of abuses and missteps (see medical studies of the mid-20th century for lots of interesting examples).
But there's more. For the past few decades (beginning seriou
> " the amount (or absence of) alternative solutions to a problem"
That would be bullshit, the FIRST theory would be assumed to be the RIGHT theory by virtue of the lack of alternatives!
> " the degree by which a theory is connected to already confirmed theories"
The most padded theory would win.
The biggest problem isn't with the scientific method, is with people. They will self-deceive, they will ignore causality, they will contrive the most obvious tricks to prove things. And once a body of science is taught in University and Schools, then their entire self is defined as an expert in that body of knowledge.... so they are no longer defending the theory anymore, they are defending their own self worth! What if all they learned is false? Then they are worthless!
So to have a testable result, it must pass logic. Which means:
1. Anything that breaks causality is false.
2. Anything that time-travels-backwards breaks causality, because you could construct a paradox experiment that would be impossible.
Yet there is an entire body of demonstrable false science that currently breaks these rules, and the belief system that sustains the lie. This is the problem science faces now. The scientific method is fine, it doesn't need help. It's the people that need help.
Oh, I'm asking about the scientific method here. Is it possible to discover truth using it? Is that an interesting question? I think it's interesting. Bit of a philosophical question, though, isn't it?
You say "knowledge" is a pretty good alternative to "truth"? But most people would agree that truth is a prerequisite for knowledge, that to know a thing you must believe it, it must be true, and you must be justified in your belief. If you want to claim that the scientific method can lead to knowledge without the need for truth, you will need some argument to back that up - a philosophical argument.
I don't believe you could measure he answer to either of these questions. Perhaps questions like this about the scientific method are philosophical questions? Ones you might better ask a philosopher than a scientist?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
One thing that came up several times in Massimo's interesting notes was the limitation of not looking outside the particle cone (or is it 'light cone'). I was wondering though, if someday technology might allow us to recognize that a particle was entangled with a particle on the other side of the light cone, and therefore, give a hint as to what was out there. Hmmm, is that analogous to trying to find out what's inside a black hole?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Read it an weep for science:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser
"The delayed choice quantum eraser experiment investigates a paradox. If a photon manifests itself as though it had come by a single path to the detector, then "common sense" (which Wheeler and others challenge) says it must have entered the double-slit device as a particle. If a photon manifests itself as though it had come by two indistinguishable paths, then it must have entered the double-slit device as a wave. If the experimental apparatus is changed while the photon is in midflight, then the photon should reverse its original "decision" as to whether to be a wave or a particle. Wheeler pointed out that when these assumptions are applied to a device of interstellar dimensions, a last-minute decision made on earth on how to observe a photon could alter a decision made millions or even billions of years ago."
Logic would suggest it has both the properties of a particle and a wave at the same time, because anything else breaks causality.
Changing the photon from wave to particle at T2a, means the emission of it is also changes at T1a, and thus the matter that emitted it is also changed at T0, and affects the other photons it emitted at T1b and their state at T2b. So T2b might need to be a particle to satisfy the change you made at T2a, yet someone else might measure it that requires it to be a wave. Impossible Paradox. Hence model is false.
It's a basic faulty dichotomy.
It could also be a swarm of smaller spinning dipole particles, the wave property is the net effect of the spin. You measure it with an electronic detector, that promotes and demotes electrons through fixed orbits, so your detector imposes a quantum on any measurement you make. i.e. below a threshold you cannot detect small parts of the swarm because it is not sufficient to promote an electron. It appears to be a particle in one place because that is all your detector can detect.
What keeps the swarm together? Model it, you'll understand the attraction force between two spinning dipoles, they order themselves so the attraction ends spin closer than the repulsion ends, giving a net clumping force.
But the whole point here, is that a demonstrably false idea, QM continues to be pushed as true by believers and it has nothing to do with science,a dn everything to do with a basic logic flaw.
But is the scientific method a tool to discover what is true? Is truth the same as "ever more accurate and predictive models"? It's not a scientific question.
I think by now physics has demonstrated pretty convincingly that the only thing what we can talk and reason about is not the reality, but only some model of reality. Physicists have developed a multitude of different and partially contradicting models which all "work" to some effect. If philosophers talk about anything they are also talking about a model, not a reality, and if they define "truth" as a property of reality then this notion is inherently inconsistent and their model is probably crap.
This is an insight from physics which philosophers should take into account in their work, but I am not at all sure that they do.
You win the internet today sir.
Sigh, Don't you guys know the ultimate question has been answered already, and it is 42.
The question is sadly what is six times nine, proving space isn't merely curved, it's totally bent.
All thanks to Disaster Area's Acoountant.
For further info see HHGTTG.
Truth is a word that has many meanings - and in fact, here's an interesting radio programme on the subject. You're maybe using it in at least two different ways. One can ask whether or not a particular result of an experiment is 'true', as in 'did that really occur'? Or one can ask what is really happening, what is the 'truth' behind a physical process?
I think the parent poster was suggesting that knowledge ('do my theories basically work more or less?') is in many respects more useful than 'truth' ('what's really going on here?'). It's entirely possible that no answer to the second question will ever be uncovered.
Those questions are fare less fundamental than basic physics. Philosophers naval gazed at these sorts of questions for Millennia to now worthwhile result. Philosophy works best where it tries to push out ahead of science, just a little, to ask a question that cannot *yet* be answered by science, but may be in the future.
But philosophy does highlight how little we really know, despite our ever-growing skill at the practical.
I disagree. I think science has done a better job at that as well. Without knowledge you don't understand ignorance.
And it's worth remembering that every field of science started as philosophy, and only with the tools and the mindset did it eventually become practical, become science.
One could note that philosophy in turn started as earlier things, like rhetoric and mysticism. There is such a thing as obsolescence of human ideas IMHO.
I just find myself wondering what a philosopher looks like when he's in three separate parts..
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
Science is about the testable. Math (and logic) is about the provable. Philosophy is about the more fundamental questions.
But a lot of theoretical physics straddles between your definition of science and maths. Not just String Theory but most of the Standard Model and General Relativity. Einstein wasn't trying to create a testable theory when he wanted to see what SR would say about gravity. He was simply trying to find a mathematically consistent framework that would deal with accelerating bodies and not violate SR. He didn't say, "Well I will work on this because it's testable". He just worked on the framework and its conclusions, after the fact, could be tested - lucky for Einstein. Of course, if it wasn't testable we might never know who Einstein was - so we're lucky both ways, I guess.
As Feynman said:
"The Philosophy of Science is about as useful to physicists as ornithology is to birds"
I hereby award "Science" the Awesome Trophy for being the most awesomest awesome that ever awesomed. Are you satisfied?
But is the scientific method a tool to discover what is true? Is truth the same as "ever more accurate and predictive models"? It's not a scientific question.
Unless you are prepared to define "truth", your argument is horseshit. The concepts of true and false have rather specific meanings within scientific context. "Truth", especially within the context of philosophy, is (usually) something quite different. The "method", or more precisely, methods (plural) of philosophy are ad hoc. Scientific method is anything but that.
"But philosophy does highlight how little we really know, despite our ever-growing skill at the practical."
There is an alternative explanation : naturalistic and practicable application were shedded one by one once from philosophy question were answered as you also say. It could very well be that all is left, is nothing more than intractable unanswerable questions, which only lead to dead end. In other word philosophy was sucked dry and all that is left is a dry hulk, with all unanswerable question which may lead to debate but never to a conclusion. As such philosophy as it is today would indeed be only mental exercise and nothing interesting in itself.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Who are you going to listen to, dear readers? David Gross, who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering asymptotic freedom, or Slashdot's very own Roger W Moore, who won ... a few points from intellectually lazy moderators who cheered Mr Moore's eloquent dismissal of the Nobel-winning particle physicist's ideas as "tripe" and "absolutely no sense"?
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I'd put it that way: 90% of publications in philosophy are complete and utter rubbish, but the remaining 10% are extremely interesting and well worth studying. So you need to ask the right philosopher.
As far as the philosophy of physics is concerned, a minimum criterion of adequacy is in my opinion that the philosopher has also studied physics and understands the mathematics that is relevant to the questions at hand. These people are generally rare and might not even exist if the topic is string theory.
Philosophy is not the scientific method, but philosophy is where the scientific method comes from.
This is a myth based on the fact that for a long time practically all natural scientists were also philosophers, because there was no clear separation between the disciplines. It's much fairer to say that scientific method evolved from experimentation about the physical world triggered by overwhelming curiosity.
How has it moved ahead?? TFA makes it pretty obvious that especially areas of physics have moved backwards in those respects by abandoning the revelations of Popper's critical rationalism, and moved to what? — not to something new that scientists alone came up with, but to bullshit ideas like "inductive support is probabilistic support" that was argued by Popper's _contemporary_ _philosophers_ Elby et al. (and defeated at each round).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Hipster fucktard (StartsWithABang) and moronic editors debate the baiting of clicks.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Adding a good helping of philosophy into the mix can sometimes help people look at something from another angle which in turn can add value to the scientific method.
Why? Because you say so? That's what every bullshit, non-scientific religion and fantasy world-view claims. Science existed before Philosophy. Science is learning. It is recognizing the way the world works, remembering it, and using that to your advantage. The most basic of life-forms do this in one form or another. All the way down to the simplest of Viruses (the knowledge/learning is stored in the DNA/RNA). Philosophy and religion is just mental masturbation.
Science proceeds from the singular to the general. And in doing so it has to deal with the unknowable.
What is a law of nature ? Testing always introduces uncertainties, so at what point can we decide we've confirmed a particular law of nature ? There is a fundamental arbitrariness in such choices. And logic or mathematics cannot give you the complete answer. The scientific method is as its name describes a (conceptual, intellectual) framework for doing scientific activity. Falsifiability is only one criteria that can be used in the scientific method. It is by all means not unique. And as science changes so does our understanding of this fundamental conceptual framework that enables scientists to do their work. Epistemologists have certainly a role to play in this debate.
A theory, in science, is an overarching framework of proposed causation that explains multiple phenomena. The theory of gravity didn't just talk about why apples fall to earth, it ALSO explained why the planets went around each the sun, the moons around the planets and the tides, weight, falling and so on. It ALSO explained why theodolites would point nearer a big dense mountain, why the earth wasn't a sphere and all that crap too.
If they had to be individual things to be theories, as these morons insist, then we'd have to have the "things fall to earth" theory, the "moons orbit planets" theory, the "planets orbit stars" theory, etc. Because those are observed things, but there's no observation that ties them all together.
The theory of gravity ties them all together. Hence that is a theory, NOT a "framework".
Remind me again, what's PhD an abbreviation of?
The concepts of true and false have rather specific meanings within scientific context.
Citation needed, or at least write what you believe those specific meanings are.
Sorry, this is logical discourse 101, not kindergarden. You have to give WHY your claim stands and then others can offer counterpoint to it and instead of the parochial view of one person, it becomes the general consensus that defines whether we are better off believing one group or another on their field of expertise or not.
Philosophy majors tend to be better at asking questions than answering them.
Usually "paper or plastic" and "do you want fries with that?"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And all you ed for a nobel is some really surprising proof in a paper, you don't get made automatically right outside that paper's statements from it.
Yassa Arrafat got a Nobel. Would you believe him on science methods?
Socrates once said that the only wisdom he had was in understanding how little he knew.
Socrates also agreed that "All we are is dust in the wind, dude."
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Science will never be able to prove that we live in an impersonal Universe, for which the scientific method always works. This is an assumption that you need to apply the scientific method. You can never prove your assumptions!
I wouldn't ask a carpenter to command an aircraft carrier, which makes as much sense as your analogy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
".. untestable, non-empirical, and offers no concrete predictions or methods of falsification" Sounds like physicists want in on that sweet climate change scientific method.
The last two are by definition impossible to quantify. My guess is that they are much more common than the first. So let us limit ourselves to only the first kind of error. Estimate the probability that the human process that resulted in the big bang theory is fatally flawed by a type I error. Now estimate the probability of the big bang initial singularity! This number is immensely smaller than the other figure. Apply Hume's argument against miracles.
One finds it is not rational to believe in the big bang theory. This is a killer argument! I accept it.
If one examines the argument in detail one finds that it applies to any theory that assumes the 3rd law of thermodynamics over cosmic times!
Refute it if you can!
It had been clear for quite some time that the string theory emperor has no physical clothes. This is just another nail in its coffin. I wonder what a luminary like Steve Weinberg, still confident about string theory and contemptuous of philosophy, is thinking?
The difference is simple. Mathematics (and philosophy) describe possibilities, rather than actualities. They are more like languages, not sciences. They don't use the Scientific Method to test reality. If you don't test your theories, then you are not doing science.
This is not an insult, we need mathematicians just as much as we need physicists and their work is just as hard.
It is a rather technical distinction, but a real one.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
And there are non-philosophic fields that ask questions, too:
General Semantics asks 'what does "to be" mean?'
Information Theory asks 'what does a question mean?'
Intelligent beings ask questions.
Origination of query is possibly the only real test that something is thinking and not just a fancy brain-like hammer whacking mindlessly on grammar nails.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjK9GJMBpt0
If you can't measure the world with it, what does it matter? The whole purpose of a model is to map reality.
And it's worth remembering that every field of science started as philosophy, and only with the tools and the mindset did it eventually become practical, become science.
Thus, early scientists were were usually referred to as "Natural Philosophers". Though I'm not sure what an UNnatural philosophy would refer to. :-) The difference between natural and unnatural is in itself a philosophical debate.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Funny how particle Physicists don't have a problem with the scientific method....I guess if you can't prove you theory you just redefine what proof is....Einstein never had an issue with the scientific method and came up with some pretty interesting tests for quantum mechanics.
It's not our fault that you string theorists have wasted your lives in pursuit of a pipe dream....
Actually, science is hard at work answering the questions of what we know we don't know.
Every time we learn something new, we learn even more things that we don't know.
That is science increases the known-unknowns faster than the known-knowns. Obviously, it is silent on the unknown-unkowns, other than to imply that it is even larger than the known-unknowns by virtue of how every time we add a known-known, we add multiple known-unknowns.
I just finished reading What Is This Thing Called Science (a highly topical overview but illuminating nonetheless) and I was considering saying a lot of what you said, but I think you said it better than I would have.
What I found to be the most interesting was how there really was no one overarching theory of science that could even fit the past (and much more straightforward) discoveries. String theory in a lot of ways really pushes our concept of a theory, and string theorists accept that their theories may not be experimentally testable in their own lifetimes but are devoted to it nonetheless.
Another thing I took away from WITTCS was that lack of falsifiable assertions is not a reason to stop developing a theory. Expecting a TOE that seeks to explain as much as string theory to be experimentally testable so relatively soon after its inception is maybe jumping the gun. Its a conversation worth having, but if that book taught me anything it was let scientists do their thing for a while.
Also, a bunch of slashdot neckbeards are not qualified to judge String Theory (and most of the rest of physics you can't observe with your own eyes), stick to your popular science simplifications that give you the illusion you understand things. I don't understand it either, but I know enough to know that.
Unless you are prepared to define "truth", your argument is horseshit.
I made no argument. I asked a simple question. The scientific method is a method for producing more accurate models over time. Does that correspond with "truth" in some way? I'm not sure, but my point is it's a philosophical question, not a scientific one, as you can't measure the answer.
The concepts of true and false have rather specific meanings within scientific context.
Oh? Are you confusing science with mathematics? We don't prove things true in science, we demonstrate the accuracy of a model. But everyone gets that it's a model, that the map is not the territory. It's not obvious that you could ever learn the truth by refining models, as there are an infinity of models consistent with any given set of data. It's not obvious that you couldn't, either.
The "method", or more precisely, methods (plural) of philosophy are ad hoc. Scientific method is anything but that.
Everything starts ad-hoc. After how many centuries or millennia do you accept a method of reasoning to be otherwise? Philosophy is a rather old discipline, you know.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
String theorists need to borrow a leaf from another field of science:
1. Build a massive computer model that incorporates maybe 10% of all known mechanisms of whatever it is you're trying to model.
2. Use incomplete and heavily filtered data sets to fiddle with the model until you obtain the outputs you desire. A sufficiently complex model can fit any data you want.
3. Go to the politicians and the media, and declare the science settled.
4. Demand a permanent presence in the policy making and funding decisions because your field is crucially important.
5. Ridicule and intimidate who dares challenge your methods.
6. ???
7. Profit
There is such a thing as obsolescence of human ideas IMHO.
Sure, when we know all there is to know about the physical world, and there's nothing left to learn, science will be obsolete. When we know all there is to know about the abstract world, and there's nothing left to learn, philosophy will be obsolete - but I rather suspect that will come later.
One good example is "ethics", which stubbornly remains a philosophical field, seeming immune to either mathematical proof from first principles (except for those of some strong faith), or to empirical measurement. Without a god to provide the answers in the back of the book, we're stuck with our intuitions and our ability to reason about them. And we're far from any sort of general agreement on the answers.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Two points: first my criticism was aimed at the author's interpretation of the talk which I suspect missed much of the relevant detail. Hence the admonition to not trust the philosopher. Second science is not based on personality: arguments are won or lost on the evidence to support the positions. Arguing that because someone with a Nobel Prize said it it must be right might be how an philosopher would argue but for a scientist it carries no merit. However if that does not persuade you then clearly you must believe in the paranormal because Brian Josephson does and he has a Nobel Prize.
So if you disagree with me point out why my arguments are wrong. Don't try to claim that something is right simply because of who said it or, in this case, because of what someone else thought he said. It's extremely unscientific.
Scientists implement science, but philosophers of science *define* science.
Yes, I'm sure that Berkeley (1685-1753) and Kant (1724-1804) took their inspiration from modern physicists.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Note that the nature of this hypothetical god is also a matter of intuitions and how we reason about them, so we get no further by introducing religion to ethics.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The Philosophy of Science is about as useful to physicists as biology and sociology are to humans. huh.
Of course not. Just as you won't see architects putting up walls.
The point is that the scientific method was the product of philosophy, not science. Aristotle, Descartes, Roger Bacon...all philosophers. Go down the list.
Philosophers made it, scientists use it.
The scientific method used in the real world by scientists was divorced from the philosopher's scientific method several hundred years ago.
You sound like someone who as studied some science, but never actually done anything outside of canned class experiments.
The scientific method couldn't have evolved from experimentation and curiosity, because that's the basis of the scientific method, and so the basis of the scientific method has to predate that. Therefore, it is philosophical in origin.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Oh, sure you do. An omniscient being could simple tell us the answers - or at least tell us the first principles. We can postulate the sort of god who defines those first principles as well. Demonstrating that such a god exists is a separate matter (though I'd imagine it would be an easy task were the proposition true), but it does provide an out.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Natural philosophy is concerned with the natural world. "un-natural" philosophy is metaphysics, theology, etc.
One can ask whether or not a particular result of an experiment is 'true', as in 'did that really occur'? Or one can ask what is really happening, what is the 'truth' behind a physical process?
The distinction vanishes if you think deeply about it. I think some people confuse "accurate" with "true". Science discovers ever-more-accurate models, but you can't ever prove them true in any sense of the word. You can't prove them exactly accurate, and you can prove that the underlying reality looks anything like the model, and so on.
think the parent poster was suggesting that knowledge ('do my theories basically work more or less?') is in many respects more useful than 'truth' ('what's really going on here?').
That's not really what the word "knowledge" means, as knowledge requires truth. "Useful" is perhaps a bit subjective, as research scientists and engineers have been arguing forever.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sure, when we know all there is to know about the physical world, and there's nothing left to learn, science will be obsolete. When we know all there is to know about the abstract world, and there's nothing left to learn, philosophy will be obsolete - but I rather suspect that will come later.
What does philosophy have to say about the abstract world that mathematics doesn't say? Give your abstract idea any structure, any consistency, any pattern, and it becomes a mathematical idea.
One good example is "ethics", which stubbornly remains a philosophical field, seeming immune to either mathematical proof from first principles (except for those of some strong faith), or to empirical measurement. Without a god to provide the answers in the back of the book, we're stuck with our intuitions and our ability to reason about them. And we're far from any sort of general agreement on the answers.
I strongly disagree. For starters, a key requirement of ethics is consistency (that is, you try for a system with objectivity) which brings in logic and mathematics.
Also, if you want parsimony (because a 10 billion page rulebook is a bit hard for the naked apes to figure out) in your description of your system of ethics, say by deriving the rules of the system from basic principles, you need logic and mathematics for that as well.
If you want your system of ethics to satisfy wants of the participants to any degree, you've just introduced economics. This would at first glance appear to be a small niche, but IMHO ignorance of economics is the greatest failing of attempts at constructing ethics systems. Medical ethics and legal systems are particularly notorious for causing harm to thousands, millions, or even billions of people in order to prevent rich guys.
Finally, if you want your system of ethics to fit well with the natural world and behavior of the participants in your system, you need science.
And we're far from any sort of general agreement on the answers.
It's not the difficulties of ethics that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest. A very common one is that you have way too much stuff. I want the stuff. Therefore, I favor an ethical system that gets me that stuff. But there's a catch. For some strange reason, you seem to be of the opinion that you don't have too much stuff, that instead, I'm the one with too much stuff. And crazy enough, you want my stuff. Thus, conflict of interest.
Experimentation and curiosity go very far back into prehistory.
Except that God doesn't talk clearly to us, so people tell us what they think God wants us to hear. Personally, I'm not claiming to be smarter than God (should such exist), but I'm a whole lot smarter than a great many people who claim to speak for God.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
your restatement of the essence of the discussion was very helpful to me "truer" is the wrong objective - better positioned to lead to more and better prediction is. This sounds like an argument over whose intuition that the underlying mathematics is on a better path to come out of the roadblocks is right. I'm not sure what the point of the animosity is. In the end if they are right they will prevail and if they aren't better they weren't so obnoxious about it now.... .
Or does this sound rather desperate? String Theorists have now spent 20 years trying to make spaghetti sauce with their theorizing and they still don't even have so much as a mess in the kitchen. So now they try to move the goalposts to validate that their careers have not been wasted on an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
I predict that this won't work.
So, how many angels can dance on a pinhead?
Oh, wait. That's theology. Completely different.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Codswallop. Philosophy is nothing more than verbal machination based on "It sounds right to me", and doesn't even require valid logic and consistency outside of a very few schools gathered together under the umbrella of analytic philosophy. Exactly like religion, the only thing that most of philosophy requires for validation is agreement among its practitioners. It doesn't even require all of them to agree, just a small clique is ample and entirely normal.
Science in contrast is based on confirmation and hence also validation not by humans but by reality herself, and no other party matters. The opinion of scientists as thinkers matters not one iota, and their names are attached to concepts merely as convenient labels, not as validation through authority.
The two disciplines couldn't be more different.
I don't believe you could measure he answer to either of these questions. Perhaps questions like this about the scientific method are philosophical questions? Ones you might better ask a philosopher than a scientist?
And are thus completely unanswerable, and completely unimportant.
a philosopher in three separate parts
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Oh, sure, but philosophically we can postulate a god that did talk to us, which would be an easy out for moral first principles.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What does philosophy have to say about the abstract world that mathematics doesn't say? Give your abstract idea any structure, any consistency, any pattern, and it becomes a mathematical idea.
Logic is still taught by the philosophy department in many universities. Meta-logic is a branch of philosophy, though it has lots of overlap with computability theory. In any case, you can't reason very far about "does math work" using math - that's the fundamental problem of meta-logic. How you you reason about the boundaries of a system of reasoning? You can't prove that a system of reasoning is good using that same system, obviously (though you can't sometimes prove it doesn't, though contradiction).
Also, math tells us little about Epistemology, Theory of Identity, Theory of Language, Meta-Ethics, whether induction works, whether we're in the Matrix, and on and on. Basically, all of modern philosophy.
strongly disagree. For starters, a key requirement of ethics is consistency (that is, you try for a system with objectivity) which brings in logic and mathematics.
Sure, but that's only relevant once you have first principles to reason from. Where do those come from? What sort of system of evaluation even makes sense in this realm? That's the field of Meta-Ethics: how could you know or prove that an ethical system was correct?
It's not the difficulties of ethics that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest.
How is that not a key difficulty of ethics? We're not very good yet at reasoning about ethical systems as we don't have a good structure to shield the process from individuals desired, self-serving outcomes. Similarly for political systems and political debate, where honest debate barely exists. It's a hard philosophical problem, one I doubt we'll solve this century.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In any case, you can't reason very far about "does math work" using math - that's the fundamental problem of meta-logic. How you you reason about the boundaries of a system of reasoning? You can't prove that a system of reasoning is good using that same system, obviously (though you can't sometimes prove it doesn't, though contradiction).
Mathematics has done quite a good job of studying this. It is known that any sufficiently complex system of proof or mathematics has statements that can't be proven in the system. This includes an inability to determine whether the system is consistent (that is, completely without paradox). Similarly, there is a lot of case study on the constraints of applying math to the physical world. Philosophy can't improve on that.
strongly disagree. For starters, a key requirement of ethics is consistency (that is, you try for a system with objectivity) which brings in logic and mathematics.
Sure, but that's only relevant once you have first principles to reason from. Where do those come from? What sort of system of evaluation even makes sense in this realm? That's the field of Meta-Ethics: how could you know or prove that an ethical system was correct?
It's also relevant if you have desired outcomes and are trying to figure out spaces of basic principles that lead to the desired outcomes.
If one looks at actual attempts at ethics, basic principles are never developed completely in vacuum. There are always some real world situation or pattern that the proposer of the axioms is trying to abstract. Math or logic is very important to evaluating choices of axioms or to precluding certain sorts of axioms in a simple way.
It's not the difficulties of ethics that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest.
How is that not a key difficulty of ethics? We're not very good yet at reasoning about ethical systems as we don't have a good structure to shield the process from individuals desired, self-serving outcomes. Similarly for political systems and political debate, where honest debate barely exists. It's a hard philosophical problem, one I doubt we'll solve this century.
It's not the difficulty of resolving conflicts of interest that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest themselves. If we want conflicting goals out of our system of ethics, then nothing will simultaneously fully satisfy us.
We're not very good yet at reasoning about ethical systems as we don't have a good structure to shield the process from individuals desired, self-serving outcomes.
Why should we expect that such a structure can exist? Blatantly contradictory goals can't be simultaneously resolved. Even stuff that appears to be resolvable, like a voting system that satisfies a variety of reasonable sounding axioms can be contradictory.
Godel showed a fundamental limitation of logical systems. Like I said - you can disprove a system using the system, but you can't prove one. I learned about all this from classes taught by the Philosophy department in school - though there was similar content in CompSci classes from a very different angle.
I guess it's a matter of debate whether you call Proof Theory (and its parent, metalogic) math or philosophy or both, but you seem to be calling all systems of formal reasoning "math", which isn't what most people mean. Certainly there are journals with "Philosophy" in the title where such results are published.
If one looks at actual attempts at ethics, basic principles are never developed completely in vacuum. There are always some real world situation or pattern that the proposer of the axioms is trying to abstract. Math or logic is very important to evaluating choices of axioms or to precluding certain sorts of axioms in a simple way.
You won't get far in physics without math, but they're nevertheless distinct fields. Math is a tool used in many fields.
Why should we expect that such a structure can exist?
Because it hasn't been proven not to, and it's the job of philosophers to take on such problems. Whenever a good, practical answer is found to such fundamental questions, it stops being philosophy and becomes some new discipline. Sure, it's quite rare, but it's important when it happens.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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I guess it's a matter of debate whether you call Proof Theory (and its parent, metalogic) math or philosophy or both, but you seem to be calling all systems of formal reasoning "math", which isn't what most people mean.
Most people don't understand the subject well enough to have an opinion.
You won't get far in physics without math, but they're nevertheless distinct fields. Math is a tool used in many fields.
And the reason they are distinct is because physics has distinctly non-mathematical subject matter and goals.
Why should we expect that such a structure can exist?
Because it hasn't been proven not to, and it's the job of philosophers to take on such problems. Whenever a good, practical answer is found to such fundamental questions, it stops being philosophy and becomes some new discipline. Sure, it's quite rare, but it's important when it happens.
It's worth noting that I already mentioned a couple of cases where impossibility has been proven. Economics has plenty more like these. When people or other relevant parties want different things that can't be simultaneously satisfied, which happens all the time, then that's it. You can't do what can't be done.
You either have to compromise/trade (for which we have plenty of well demonstrated economic systems which are adequate), develop a technology or infrastructure that allows you to do the currently impossible (which is usually something of a long shot), or perhaps change peoples' wants (say via propaganda/advertising). Philosophy doesn't really have much to add in this matter.