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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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."
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.
String theory isn't a theory at all. Maybe I'm too much of a stickler about terminology, but I think it matters here. Calling something a theory implies two things:
1) There is a model of something in the universe, which makes definite predictions that can, in principle, be tested and falsified.
2) Experiments have been conducted and the observations support the definite predictions that are made.
If the first condition is met, it's a hypothesis. If both the first and second conditions are met, we call it a theory. When a theory is repeatedly tested over a wide range of conditions and the observations still support the definite predictions, we may start to refer to it as a law.
These distinctions matter. There are plenty of people who dismiss evolution and say it's just a theory. And yet there are vast amounts of evidence that support evolution. When we refer to untested ideas as theories, we diminish people's acceptance of actual theories like evolution. If we call something a theory when it isn't even an actual hypothesis, we risk confusing people into believing that things like intelligent design and young Earth creationism are also legitimate hypotheses and theories. They're not!
We can't play fast and loose with our terminology. It confuses people who already don't really understand the scientific method. We need to be precise about what we mean.
That is a great example of begging the question [wikipedia.org].
Again, it seems you have no idea what you're talking about. I wasn't begging the question, I was rephrasing for the benefit of someone who appears to be pointless. There's no significant argumentation happening here on either side, so we aren't even to the point where we can claim that someone's argument is bad or invalid.
You don't have to codify the method of study to use it.
The "scientific method" is precisely the codification of reasoning techniques that were in use long before. Observing something falling from a significant height, seeing it get damaged, and deciding, "I don't want that to happen to me," is not science. Science is a process involving a hypothesis, experimentation, and collection of reproducible empirical evidence. You might believe any number of rational and true things, but without engaging in some kind of experimentation or testing, those beliefs aren't science.
And that's what this whole discussion is about. People are discussing the extent to which current theoretical physics can be considered "science", since there may not be any way to directly test the models that theoretical physicists are creating.
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.
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.
Maybe because that experiment has nothing to do with any theory at all.
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
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.
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"?
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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.