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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.
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.
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."
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.
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
Meh, I'll burn some karma with you.
Science is very much a belief system. I find it a bit disconcerting that people will claim they're logical and reasoned and, if you ask the best of them, they'll tell you how they believe science. When you point out that science is, quite literally, openly admitting that it's "best guess" and probably always will be (in certain areas) and that it is illogical to believe that it is the truth they get feisty.
Of course this doesn't mean you should take something else on faith. But there's a huge difference between what we believe to be true and what is true which can be followed to all sorts of absurd conclusions. It's a hierarchal faith based belief system complete with dogma, dictation of values, proselytizing, shunning, and a greater power.
We just don't like to admit it. It's no more logical to place complete faith in it than it is to place complete faith in Jesus though we'll try to spin it that way in our heads - just like God-botherers. Of course, science has tangible benefits but we can, literally, claim everything is from science. That hammer? Yup, a product of science.
I'm far more likely to rely on science than I am a deity but that's because I understand it and I know it's an imperfect model and I do not believe it to be infallible. I do like the odds better with science than with Jesus but I've actually found the God-botherers to be a little less pushy in many areas.
(I'm pretty sure I can piss off both sides at once. What's karma if you can't burn it?)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."