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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.
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.
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.
I would also add "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are the aether of the 21st century.
Dark matter is a highly scientific and technical term that means "We don't know"
Seriously.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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
You are correct! No matter what it is that is causing the observed effects that is *dark matter.* There are many competing theories as to what dark matter is, some of them are outlandish. However, even if it turns out that the effects observed are caused by purple unicorn farts, the purple unicorn farts are dark matter.
I had an excellent conversation with a Slashdotter about this, just a few days ago, and I've concluded that I hate the name as much as I hate The God Particle. I can think of no other reason why people are so unwilling to understand. It's really quite simple. It is simple enough for *me* to understand it. Something is causing an effect. No matter what that is, whatever it turns out to be that is causing that effect, it is dark matter.
I know, I was even given some sort-of-thanks, that I explained this quite clearly in the thread that was active just this week. I even explained it multiple times and had some great replies and a good time was had by all. In that thread, I postulated that I'd need to repeat the same damned thing in this thread. Nobody ever listens to a KGIII. *sighs*
But, well, at least you get it, I don't know why the rest don't. However, I make this post to point out that I'd not thought about the term "place holder." I'm stealing that. I'm going to tweak it a little. We call it Dark Matter, as a place holder, because that lorem ipsum whateverum is just too damned long to type and memorize. Seriously, how is this a contentious matter? Now, the various theories as to what is causing the effect are straight up stupid (some of them) but that's immaterial.
I don't think that they thought it through very well when they decided to use this as a name. I can understand why some people are confused. I can't understand why they stay that way.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."