Slashdot Mirror
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.
In what sense?
If you don't accept that the scientific method is a viable approach to uncovering the manner in which the universe behaves, I would ask why you don't step off the ledge at the top of a tall building. If you believe that experimentation or empirical data is unnecessary to establish the veracity of some claim I would ask why you would not purchase from me a potion for the sum of $100 that I claim will make you $10000 richer on the morrow.
Someone might be able to talk a commendable piece of bullshit, but they will rarely act on such foolishness at their own expense. Philosophy made itself pointless and obsolete with the creation of the scientific method and it has become little more than religion for the modern age.
A poor example. The Catholic Church was never in the business of exploration or investigation. It got involved in science as far as it did because it had some political and social implications. Not to mention that science and every other pursuit would be subordinated to the revelation of God.
Of course, as other people pointed out, the scientific method, in the West, was in large part was pioneered by Catholic clerics. So, perhaps the answer to your question is that it took approximately 1,875 years for the Catholic Church to invent the light bulb. And 1,945 years to invent the Atomic Bomb.
Or perhaps comparing a serious philosopher interested in science to the meddling of the Catholic hierarchy is silly. Religion may contain philosophy, but philosophy is not confined to religion.
And you could certainly invent light bulbs even if you had an imperfect, even fallacious understanding of electricity. All you have to do is manage to replicate the rules allowing a light bulb to work, often through brute force observation and trial and error. Your backing theory doesn't have to be right if you blunder into the correct implementation.
Anyway, science clearly has legitimacy because it does manage to produce things. That much is true.
However, the investigation of science has gone far beyond what we could experiment on directly with the energies available to us. So, for that reason the string theorists and philosophers may have a point.
Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and string “theory” are not theories, but rather frameworks.
This is an accurate statement. "Quantum mechanics" isn't a theory by itself. It's a framework in which to construct theories. So, for example, the Dirac theory of the electron is a theory built out of quantum mechanics. Quantum electrodynamics is a theory built out of quantum field theory, and so on.
The word "theory" in "quantum field theory" or "string theory" is more like the word "theory" in "group theory". Physicists use group theory, but group theory is not a scientific theory in the sense that hard sciences like physics use the term.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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.
"I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something."
Or is it you?
"The observational support for Dark Matter is staggering. "
As it was the case for Aether before 1905.
"There is simply not enough matter of any of the types that we have in the Standard Model to explain the directly observable effect of gravity"
As there were nothing to explain i.e. Michelson-Morley experiment but an inelastic aether compressing everything as it speeds up.
"Dark Matter out-masses all of the types of matter we understand"
Aether compresses all the types of matter we know too. Yes, just like Dark Matter has its oddities, like being able to penetrate all solids (but we know "solids" are basically vacuum with small "grains" of atoms here and there, so no problem) or not producing trails when a solid mass travels through it but, how else could you explain that light's speed doesn't change despite the emiting object's speed!?
"The discovery of cosmic acceleration similarly is direct observational evidence of the existence of Dark Energy."
The discovery of the speed of light being the same in the Earth's axis of movement around the Sun and perpendicular to it, is also observational evidence of the existence of Aether. You can ask Ernst Match if you don't believe me.
Of course, by 1905 came some Einstein telling us a different story, you know.
"These two physical realities are so different from the hypothesized "ether" of pre-modern physics that it is clear you do not understand any of this."
Or maybe it's you the one that ignore the real history behind aether, that doesn't understand the real current state of modern cosmology or the really brilliant minds of the likes of Match, Poincaré or Lorentz before Einstein.