
Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science - olasaustralia
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science/
======
Animats
Physics used to be "hard science" \- if it wasn't testable, it wasn't
meaningful. Physicists used to look down on other sciences for that reason.
This article shows how much worse things have become. Nobody can figure out a
way to test string theory. In cosmology, you can only observe, not experiment.
As the article points out, the big questions are out of reach for scaling
reasons.

Trying to fix the problem through weaker definitions of "testable" is
desperation. All those smart people hate to face the fact that what they're
doing may be total bullshit. This has major economic consequences for
physicists - why should they be funded? Physics is funded because it produced
the atomic bomb and semiconductors. Those came from the testable parts of
physics. Untestable physics cannot produce engineering technology.

(The article says "no one has ever seen an atom". That's just wrong. There are
lots of picture of atoms. Even pictures of atoms lined up to spell "IBM".[1])

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/05/us/2-researchers-spell-
ibm...](http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/05/us/2-researchers-spell-ibm-atom-by-
atom.html)

~~~
adekok
> Physics used to be "hard science" -

Physics is still a hard science. However, the _edges_ of physics are difficult
to test.

> In cosmology, you can only observe, not experiment

Saying that is like saying "we don't know evolution is true, because we don't
see new species evolve every day". It's a naive approach to science.

In both cases, you can use theories to make predictions about _new_ things to
look for. e.g.
[http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/](http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/)

> Physics is funded because it produced the atomic bomb and semiconductors.

Physics is funded because it's cool. And it still gets less funding than major
sports leagues. So by your definition, the NFL is funded because it's part of
a national defence strategy?

~~~
gamesbrainiac
The NFL is funded because it provides entertainment, and we all know how well
that sells.

~~~
wolfgke
The German word for entertaiment is "Unterhaltung", which is composed of
"unten" and "halten" ("down" and "hold") - and that is what entertainment is:
Holding the masses down (such that they don't ascend or revolt).

Guess who is thus interested in funding entertainment.

~~~
chki
I think that is not only incorrect considering the content but probably also
the semantics involved. There are many German words that have "Unter" in them
("Unternehmen" \--> Company; "Untersuchung" \--> study) where it does not
relate to the word "unten" in any way.

~~~
kgwgk
In fact it seems to be related to the "among" meaning of "unter". The
etymology is similar for other languages:

[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=entertain](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=entertain)

------
cabinpark
I think high level theory is wandering aimlessly through a field blindfolded
with little guidance or where to look. This is because our current theories
are so good, we have no idea where to look. So it begins conjecturing and
conjecturing. What it ends up with is nonsensical garbage that does little to
advance physics.

But yet, there isn't a crisis in physics at all since these theorists are so
far removed from reality, I don't really care what they think. They don't
really tell use anything useful or interesting so I tend to ignore them.
Instead, I focus on things we do know exist but cannot explain, say
astrophysical jets, pulsars, or supernovas. We know they exist and we can see
them, yet we understand them very little. We have models that are getting
better and better over time, but they all exist within the current
understanding of physics. This is where physics really is. Whatever garbage
the theorists put up on the arxiv can be ignored with little loss.

Instead, those of us "in the trenches" can continue our work trying to explain
observed phenomena with our current theories. There is no need to add in extra
dimensions or cohomology. Maybe, when we've done really understanding our
current theories can we talk to those theorists again.

Incidentally, since I started my PhD in physics doing numerical relativity, my
views on science have changed completely. I used to be interested in stuff
like string theory, but actually sitting down and trying to do it left me
feeling empty inside. Now that I work in an area that is very closely related
to observations, I feel like I am actually learning something about the
universe. It's hard to explain philosophically, but I really believe in
experiments as the guiding principle of science. In my case, we see pulsars
(2500+ of them) and we have yet to provide a full explanation of their nature.
To me there is something more real and scientific about this then trying to
explain multiverse theory but I don't know the words to describe it.

~~~
purpled_haze
> But yet, there isn't a crisis in physics at all since these theorists are so
> far removed from reality, I don't really care what they think. They don't
> really tell use anything useful or interesting so I tend to ignore them.

Einstein was a theoretical physicist. Without his theories:

* Japan might not have been defeated in WWII.

* There might be more coal power plants, because there would be no nuclear power plants.

* GPS probably would never have worked.

* We'd have fewer successful space missions.

* There would be no superconductive magnets.

* There would be no digital cameras or solar cells.

* There would be no lasers.

I could keep going if you want...

References:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity)

[http://www.guidetothecosmos.com/present_wwe.html](http://www.guidetothecosmos.com/present_wwe.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission)

~~~
fengwick3
I don't think you seem to understand the argument here. Einstein is a prime
example of a theorist whose bold theories predicted verifiable results, such
as the Einstein Cross. The problem with modern theorists, as the article and
the parent comment articulated, is that string theories and whatnot often
predict untestable and unverifiable results. This is not an attack on all
physics theorists - rather, it's a criticism on the fashionable line of
research into string theories and other unverifiable theories.

~~~
lmm
"Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord; the theory is correct". Einstein's
theories were ultimately verified, but only long after they were completed.
Research into string theory is driven by its theoretical elegance in exactly
the same way as Einstein's original SR work.

------
weinzierl

        Nowadays, as several philosophers at the workshop said, 
        Popperian falsificationism has been supplanted by Bayesian 
        confirmation theory, or Bayesianism, a modern framework 
        based on the 18th-century probability theory of the English 
        statistician and minister Thomas Bayes. Bayesianism allows 
        for the fact that modern scientific theories typically make 
        claims far beyond what can be directly observed — no one has 
        ever seen an atom — and so today’s theories often resist a 
        falsified-unfalsified dichotomy. Instead, trust in a theory 
        often falls somewhere along a continuum, sliding up or down 
        between 0 and 100 percent as new information becomes 
        available. “The Bayesian framework is much more flexible” 
        than Popper’s theory, said Stephan Hartmann, a Bayesian 
        philosopher at LMU. “It also connects nicely to the 
        psychology of reasoning.”
    

I've never heard of Bayesianism in this context. Is this a serious approach in
the philosophy of science?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Yes. It's a fairly natural outgrowth of falsification based theories, and is
in fact completely necessary.

Consider a simple theory - bear attacks will be very low in the UK forever.
Consider an alternate theory - bear attacks will be low until 2016 and then
the bearpocalypse happens. Both theories have passed all attempts at
falsification - they both accurately predict that bears haven't so far eaten
very few people.

The Bayesian approach is to assign a prior distribution to various theories of
this nature. Because there are infinitely many possible priors, most
exceedingly complicated (because the set of priors of complexity < C is finite
or at least compact), we'll need to (eventually) assign low probabilities to
high complexity ones. This gives a natural derivation of occams razor as well,
at least as an asymptotic law.

A very readable approach to this is a post by Scott Alexander:
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/03/the-guardian-vs-
inducti...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/03/the-guardian-vs-induction/)

Wikipedia is also pretty good:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction)

~~~
jwmerrill
> The Bayesian approach is to assign a prior distribution to various theories
> of this nature. Because there are infinitely many possible priors, most
> exceedingly complicated (because the set of priors of complexity < C is
> finite or at least compact), we'll need to (eventually) assign low
> probabilities to high complexity ones. This gives a natural derivation of
> occams razor as well, at least as an asymptotic law.

I don't think this would be a very compelling argument for Occam's razor if
you didn't already believe it. This argument says you can't assign high
probability to all "complex" theories, but it doesn't seem to say that the
high probability theories must be simple. You could use any criterion at all
to single out a high probability subset.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I didn't claim it did - all I said is that this gives Occams Razor as an
_asymptotic_ law. Intuitively, I'm claiming:

Lim_{complexity -> infinity} P(theory having fixed complexity) = 0

Stated more precisely, fix a prior distribution, then for any epsilon > 0, I
can find a complexity cutoff C (which depends on the prior) so that P(any
theory with complexity > C being true) < epsilon.

This doesn't mean that P(theory|complexity) is monotonically decreasing, that
would be a much stronger claim.

I don't know how this isn't a compelling argument, it's a provable
mathematical statement.

~~~
jwmerrill
Here's an argument that runs completely parallel:

jwmerrill's razor: points in the plane should be considered to be close to the
origin unless there is evidence otherwise.

Is this a reasonable law? As reasonable as Occam's razor? I think probably
not, but I don't have a strong opinion. One interesting thing to note is that
the law doesn't say where the origin is (similarly, Occam's razor is vague
about what exactly is meant by "simple" and "complex").

Finite asymptotic form: for any finite point set, there is a distance D such
that no point in the set is further from the origin than D.

Continuous asymptotic form: given any function from points in the plane to
non-negative numbers which has a finite integral, there is a distance D such
that the integral of the function over the region that is further from the
origin than D is less than any epsilon_1, and such that the function is
everywhere less than any epsilon_2 on this region except perhaps on a set of
measure 0.

The asymptotic forms are provable mathematical statements, but I think it
would be a mistake to say that either of them is a very compelling argument
for the original statement of "jwmerrill's razor."

Without intending to call you out in particular (I don't know what opinions
you hold), I think people sometimes accept some odd logic in probability
theory that they would be less likely to accept in other contexts. Bayesian
probability theory provides practical solutions to a lot of interesting
problems, and I personally wish people would emphasize those cases more, and
make fewer sweeping statements about it being a consistent theory of all of
the scientific method.

~~~
yummyfajitas
A better statement of jwmerril's razor: points drawn from a probability
distribution have a higher likelihood than points coming from far away.

I don't really know why you _don 't_ think that the asymptotic forms are
evidence in favor of this - a prototypical probability distribution on the
real line is a bump somewhere with a decaying tail. And that "somewhere" is
far closer to the origin than points out in some arbitrarily distant tail.

Now obviously if you want to make stronger claims about a specific origin,
you'll need to specify a particular probability distribution, and justify why
that's the right one. I agree that a non-asymptotic Occams razor is an
additional assumption.

But you also get pretty far with the asymptotic theory. Consider a theory of
"green" as compared to a theory of "bleen" (namely that green turns to blue
after some time T). You have a prior with some probability that only green
exists (say 50%), and also a 50% chance that green turns to blue after some
time T. But now you have a continuous distribution over T.

Now suppose you want to make a prediction - e.g., H = "the grass will be
green, not blue, at t=50". When you compute a posterior, you reject all values
of T < 0 (supposing the present time is 0). Also, all values of T > 50
actually yield the same prediction as "only green exists". So the only way you
can get a prediction of blue at time 50 is if 0 < T < 50\. Of course, the more
time you spend gathering data, the further into the tail you move and the less
likely it is that your posterior will predict blue. I.e., Bayesian stats even
with very few assumptions gets sensible results eventually.

I do in fact hold the view that Bayesian probability is a consistent theory of
the scientific method, and also of how humans should update their beliefs when
new evidence is gathered.

(Minor nit: your continuous asymptotic form isn't slightly wrong for this
purpose, f(x) need not approach zero. Counterexample: f(x) = 1 for x \in [1,
1+2^{-1}], [2, 2+2^{-2}], etc, f(x) = 0 elsewhere. That integrates out to 1/2
+ 1/4 + ... = 1, but lim_{x -> \infty} f(x) doesn't exist.)

[I'm also a bit surprised you are being so heavily downvoted. I don't think
you are right, but you are hardly so crazily wrong that you should be greyed
out.]

------
mannykannot
"Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, pointed out that falsifiability is woefully inadequate
as a separator of science and nonscience, as Popper himself recognized.
Astrology, for instance, is falsifiable — indeed, it has been falsified ad
nauseam — and yet it isn’t science."

You could say the same for phlogiston or N-rays. Falsifiable hypotheses that
actually get falsified are dropped from science, but the process of falsifying
them is a scientific activity.

~~~
qb45
Just shows how sad academia is. Wouldn't be the first time I'm seeing those
guys ponder endlessly on something other people say or do without bothering to
really understand what those others are thinking and trying to achieve.

BTW, is astrology actually falsifiable? I'm under impression that astrologists
deliberately strive for unfalsifiability exactly to avoid falsification which
could cast doubt on their wisdom.

~~~
wolfgke
> BTW, is astrology actually falsifiable? I'm under impression that
> astrologists deliberately strive for unfalsifiability exactly to avoid
> falsification which could cast doubt on their wisdom.

It is. Just do the following experiment:

Find, say, ten persons and an (or many) astrologists and let them create a
horoscope (say, either a prognosis for the future or description of character
traits) for these 10 persons, where only the exact time and location of birth
is given to the astrologists.

After that give all ten horoscopes to all ten persons and let them rank. Now
just formulate some sensible statistical model and voila - falsified.

~~~
tokenadult
Have you heard about the Forer Effect? Horoscopes are written to be convincing
to gullible readers.

[http://skepdic.com/forer.html](http://skepdic.com/forer.html)

~~~
mannykannot
Thanks for the link to the Forer effect.

Of course, if the proponents of astrology choose to present it in a non-
falsifiable way, then it is not science from the get-go.

When astrology was conceived, it was actually respectable science, if that
concept had existed then, and it led to the development of astronomy. If you
can predict the flooding of the Nile by the rising of Sirius, what else might
the heavens show you?

------
hodwik
We had a rush of scientific breakthroughs 100 years ago. I believe we will
have more.

That experimentation in physics has slowed down to 18th century levels doesn't
mean science is over, it just means the low-hanging fruit is over and we will
have to continue slogging through theory before we discover new experiments.

Science has always relied on philosophy for its underlying direction, it's
just obvious again. It took 2040 years before science/math could answer Zeno's
paradoxes. If you can't handle the slog you're not really a scientist, you're
a technician.

~~~
coldtea
> _It took 2040 years before science /math could answer Zeno's paradoxes._

And that's only if we assume calculus answered them. Which is not the absolute
consensus of logicians/mathematicians.

Many seem to believe they are simply about limits and that's all, but they may
also point to a more fundamental aspect of reality. E.g. from Wiki:

 _A suggested problem with using calculus to try to solve Zeno 's paradoxes is
that this only addresses the geometry of the situation, and not its dynamics.
It has been argued that the core of Zeno's paradoxes is the idea that one
cannot finish the act of sequentially going through an infinite sequence, and
while calculus shows that the sum of an infinite number of terms can be
finite, calculus does not explain how one is able to finish going through an
infinite number of points, if one has to go through these points one by one.
Zeno's paradox points out that in order for Achilles to catch up with the
Tortoise, Achilles must first perform an infinite number of acts, which seems
to be impossible in and of itself, independent of how much time such an act
would require.

Another way of putting this is as follows: If Zeno's paradox would say that
"adding an infinite number of time intervals together would amount to an
infinite amount of time", then the calculus-solution is perfectly correct in
pointing out that adding an infinite number of intervals can add up to a
finite amount of time. However, any descriptions of Zeno's paradox that talk
about time make the paradox into a straw man: a weak (and indeed invalid)
caricature of the much stronger and much simpler inherent paradox that does
not at all consider any quantifications of time. Rather, this much simpler
paradox simply states that: "for Achilles to capture the tortoise will require
him to go beyond, and hence to finish, going through a series that has no
finish, which is logically impossible". The calculus-based solution offers no
insight into this much simpler, much more stinging, paradox.

A thought experiment used against the calculus-based solution is as follows.
Imagine that Achilles notes the position occupied by the tortoise, and calls
it first; after reaching that position, he once again notes the position the
turtle has moved to, calling it second, and so on. If he catches up with the
turtle in finite time, the counting process will be complete, and we could ask
Achilles what the greatest number he counted to was. Here we encounter another
paradox: while there is no "largest" number in the sequence, as for every
finite number the turtle is still ahead of Achilles, there must be such a
number because Achilles did stop counting._

~~~
im2w1l
>Imagine that Achilles notes the position ... and so on

If in logic you assume/imagine something, and reach a contradiction, then your
reaction should be to reject that assumption.

In this case we reach the conclusion that Achilles cannot note all the
positions.

~~~
coldtea
That's not adding anything new. The very idea of the thought experiment is
that we reach a contradiction and that we therefore should reject the
assumption.

The problem, and the whole point of the thought experiment, is that the
assumption is tied to Achilles being able to make the distance, so we should
ditch that too.

------
soheil
"Astrology, for instance, is falsifiable — indeed, it has been falsified ad
nauseam — and yet it isn’t science." -Pigliucci

Mind blown! Wat? If it's falsified then it's just wrong, i.e. it had the
potential to be science before it was proven to be wrong and now it isn't. He
seems to be confused about the chronology of theories. If I make up a theory
based on complete bs and it just happens to be falsifiable and then falsified
then I wasn't doing science. I don't know of any falsifiable theory that was
just pulled out of a hat, was recognized as one but wasn't immediately
falsified (if there is one then he has a point.) If I come up with a theory
and work hard to make sure it's falsifiable then I was doing science even if
the theory was later falsified.

~~~
xamuel
I'd actually argue against astrology being falsifiable. It mostly consists of
making generic "predictions" that could apply to anyone, it's the very
definition of unfalsifiability. It would be falsifiable if it made predictions
like "soheil will spend exactly 35 minutes on Hacker News today", but it
doesn't, instead it makes predictions like "You have a deeper side to you that
people don't know about", total bs but not really "false".

~~~
soheil
I also agree, as a whole, Astrology isn't falsifiable. I was giving him the
benefit of the doubt.

~~~
choosername
I'd argue that it's purer than most because measurements interfer less with
the measurenent space. The equipment and local setup are at odds, though.

------
Htsthbjig
Science is born the day that Socrates says ""I know that I know nothing".

Science dies the moment things that are untestable becomes "a new kind of
evidence".

If we can't test something because whatever reason, like we don't have enough
energy, the fact that we know we can't test it is in fact valuable. We will
have to find methods or ways to get there in the future.

Until that , we can't be sure. Fine. We know we don't know.

But falsifying this fact and believing in evidence that does not exist is
believing we know things that are unknown to us.

This is dogma, religion, philosophy, but not science.

Nothing wrong about religion, or philosophy, but it is not science.

------
daxfohl
My take on the rationales given in the article.

#1: "Only game in town": ZERO viability (perhaps negative). Ether was the only
game in town before relativity. Geocentricism was the only game in town before
it wasn't. Gods were the only game in town before science.

#2: "Y grew out of X (and X is solid)": ZERO viability (perhaps negative).
It's essentially a corollary of the exact same rationale. (e.g. X = Maxwell's
Equations, and Y = Ether). Everyone is thinking along the lines of X, and the
only thing they can come up with is Y.

#3: "Unexpectedly delivered explanations": THIS is a big deal. Or at least it
may be. This is what (I hate to say "philosophers of science", depicting
"armchair philosophers", but rather "scientists of science") need to be
focusing on. In essence, it asks: can mathematics (sometimes) be considered an
experimental science, in the Popperian sense? I think it could, if formalized,
and would allow us to tackle on some of these nasty questions more
definitively, but I have no idea what that formalization would be. However I'd
be very interested to see if etherian theory had any "unexpectedly delivered
explanations" before Einstein. THAT is worth investigating.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
A mistake that lots of people, including many in this thread, is to conflate
'physics' and 'fundamental/particle physics.'

The former's still chugging along pretty good, with things like the
"invisibility cloaking" and all sorts of condensed matter stuff.

------
dschiptsov
Probably, "we" should take a reductionist approach and stop piling up nonsense
upon nonsense, _mis-_ using math, statistics, probability and publishing more
compilations of unjustifiable and unverifiable references to another products
of unconstrained imagination, ambitions and self-praise.

Ironically, since Upanishads, there is a maxim, popularized by Buddha, that we
should strive to _" see things as they are"_ instead of worship nonsense
produced by society of mediocrity.

No better advice, probably, could be given. We are in the situation quite
similar to that one of 6th-7th century AD, where almost every person who could
barely write produce volumes of "religious" and "philosophical" doctrines,
commentaries, commentaries to commentaries and similar crap (so called Tantric
Buddhism texts, which are available in museums).

Nowadays, people who were barely graduated and had, lets say, not quite
developed, highly constrained, too specialized and excessively brainwashed
minds are doing "research", that egotistic pompous meme-joggling we could read
in any so-called academic journals.

So, let's try to _see things as they are_ , not misuse math to produce modern
hymeras and mumbo-jumbos.

------
Hermel
If it is not testable, it does not sound like physics to me. Physics is an
empirical science, and should therefore be testable by definition.

~~~
Cyph0n
A large chunk of physics is theoretical in nature. Sometimes you simply cannot
experimentally validate a phenomenon, so you instead propose a theory that
attempts to explain it using physics. Then in the future, when the phenomenon
is testable, your peers determine whether your theory was correct or not.

~~~
legulere
Atomism is a good example of how philosophy first made up a theory that was
later confirmed (in a changed version).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism)

You could also derive the Atomic nature of matter through math though, as
infinitely devisable sets end up with paradoxes that don't match up with
reality (think banarch-tarski)

You can do all this without an idea how to test it.

~~~
pdkl95
Given the knowledge available 2000+ years ago, atomism was a surprisingly good
idea. Yah, they got a lot of the details wrong, but that basic idea that
reality is made up of basic "building blocks" that combine into the larger
structures we can observe is basically correct.

The philosophers that invented atomism probably thought about how the might
see their _atoms_ directly. I wonder how many "crazy" ideas were dreamed up
that sounded impossible, that are now easy experiments to do today.

Theory is important, even if it sounds impossible _today_ , because we have a
history of redefining what is "possible" throughout the history of science.

~~~
Figs
Well, there is the case of Aristarchus who came up with the heliocentric model
of the solar system about 1800 years or so before Copernicus. His model was
rejected because of experimental evidence -- the theory predicted stellar
parallax which observation at the time could not detect! (Of course, we can
detect it now that telescopes have been invented -- the stars are just so much
farther away than anyone could have possibly believed at the time.)

------
jordanpg
> But this zooming in demands evermore energy, and the difficulty and cost of
> building new machines increases exponentially relative to the energy
> requirement, Gross said.

Part of the problem is, as Gross points out, that the cost of experimental
research at extreme scales is far out of sync with the cost of theoretical
research.

The cost of the LHC and the annual budget of NASA are, for example, are around
O($10B).

Compared with the value of the US economy (just for comparison), which is
O($10000B) or so, this doesn't seem all that high. Of course the problem is
that no _direct_ economic output stems from constructing machines for
experimental research. In addition to cost, there are the problems of time
(how long experimental work takes) and engineering manpower that might be
better spent elsewhere.

In any case, it doesn't seem obvious to me that in a different economic
context than the one we live in, which is largely focused on wasteful
consumption and war, that far, far more money couldn't be devoted to
experimental research.

------
andy_ppp
I often think about theoretical physics without really knowing enough about
it. For example, dark matter, as far as I can tell, is invented to make
gravity match how our universe behaves (there appears to be lots more mass
than we are expecting).

And I also hear that no one understands how shortly after the big bang why our
universe (a tiny ball of energy) was quite so uniform.

My theory instead of dark matter and string theory (mine is probably wrong) is
that the universe consists of every single quantum event that ever happened or
could happen and that gravity operates as a blurred field operating through
many of these close quantum "universes".

The reason could then be that the set of events that happened after the big
bang, every quantum state was explored and we are living in one of the
universes that happened to be smooth.

It should also explain why gravity is so "weak" compared to the other forces.

Anyway, I'm sure people smarter than me have thought of this and dismissed it
for whatever reason!

------
elie_CH
So they're doing Metaphysics. Time to (re)read Kant.

------
samuell
> "The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of
> modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from
> the scientific method."

Well, there are other areas of Science that have similar or even worse
problems with speculative nature and departure from the scientific method.
Read "Goo-to-you evolution". Not much "repeatable, observable experimentation"
there.

If only Biologists were as honest and honed in consistent, rational and
logical thinking as physicists.

I'm prone to think the historically more mathematical nature of the physics
discipline plays a role here.

------
dinkumthinkum
The premise here is pretty weird. There is a whole branch called philosophy of
science. You can't just say something that is wrong or untestable is by
default is philosophy.

Also, physicist have proposed some experiments and observation such as
regarding the cosmic microwave background radiation. There is a book called
"The Trouble with Physics" and many articles on the subject. There is
something to be said about many claims in theoretical physics and the lack of
testability but I think this is not rigorous enough and too loose with the
labeling.

------
smegel
What was wrong with the article title?

> A Fight for the Soul of Science

~~~
function_seven
I think that title is meaningless. The one being used here on HN succinctly
summarizes the article, while that one doesn't give me a clue about the
subject matter

------
dil8
Intersting read on Bayesian Epistemology

[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-
bayesian/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/)

------
basicplus2
and in between is quantum physics which is great for predicting outcomes but
cannot be proven that it accurately describes reality

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
What does "cannot be proven that it accurately describes reality" even mean,
because I'm not seeing the sense in it.

------
ianamartin
One of the things that has struck me for a long time about social sciences
(and sciences where, in general, the evidence is based on stochastic
processes) is that the underlying philosophy of logic is modern symbolic (aka
Boolean).

The biggest problem there is that hypotheses have no underlying mechanism to
make sure that the potential cause and effect are semantically related.

If p then q seems innocent enough. It probably seems even more innocent (or at
least more simple) than All men are mortal Socrates is a man Socrates is
therefore a mortal.

Because the required relationships in a syllogistic model can become a bit
complicated.

I started off in this realm as a Philosophy major studying mostly Aristotelian
models of deductive reasoning. It was mostly for kicks because I was a
violinist at the time and needed a break from my music theory courses.

But when I got into the market research industry and started writing
statistical software, I found serious problems with assumptions everywhere I
looked. It seemed to me that there's a real problem with the way people with
informal or introductory experience dealt with statistical results, with the
relationship between null and alternative hypotheses, and with the evidence
generated by sampling processes.

This is probably largely irrelevant to high-level Physicists, but I think it's
at least partly relevant when we talk about what is and isn't falsifiable.

There's a comment in the piece where a guy says that Astrology is falsifiable,
so we know that shouldn't be the only criteria for something to count as
Science. I think he's on to something there because I think the fundamental
hypothesis of Astrology is so far out of whack that it shouldn't have been
considered.

There's nothing behind astrology that's any better than a bad if p then q
statement. But we have no way of evaluating these by form. One can simple say,
"If the grass is green, then the moon is made of blue cheese." This is
formally a valid statement.

The problem I encounter many times (anecdotally, of course) is that people
don't treat this statement as a material implication. They treat it as a
logical conjunct. So that seems somewhat safe in the grass/moon example. They
make the mistake of thinking of it as simply as, "If the grass is green AND
the moon is made of blue cheese . . ." Well, that's clearly false. So why
bother?

But a material implication has consequences. You can flip it around and say
(by axiom) that if p then q then !q implies !p. I can assert that green grass
=> blue cheese moon. And if you accept that as valid, you can likewise assert
that !blue cheese moon => !green grass.

It's easy to see the flaws in this contrived example, but it's often very
difficult to see these problems in realistic examples when you are looking at
effect sizes in medicine, or changes in advertising techniques, or samples
from thermometers, or the kinds of things that I have no knowledge of in
theoretical Physics.

It's often very difficult to assess when a scientific study has any realistic
relationship between a null and alternative hypothesis. It would be nice if it
were all statistically about whether or not these two numbers are the same or
different, but that's frequently not the case.

I think the idea is correct, that we do need Philosophers to come up with a
better system. Even something as simple as "The subject of a material
implication must be included in the predicate of the material implication."
might be a good start. Although it's woefully naive.

It would be kind of interesting to see people testing hypothesis in the
scientific world that were formulated as syllogisms.

i.e., based on studies x, y, and z we can make the following claims: all (or
some--doesn't matter. Most "some" claims can be reduced to a subset of "all"
claims) x are y This study shows that z is x Therefore z is y

Is it limiting and problematic? Of course. Where do new categories happen?

Well, there are negations. You can prove that phenomenon z is not a member of
previously known phenomena and is therefore something else.

While I think a great many of people sort of feel this way about stuff, I
think there's a reason to codify it formally. Because so many people don't
think very clearly about these things in aggregate.

It seems kind of ugly. But it would be an improvement over what we have now,
which is basically a free-for-all in certain realms of science, where any
sufficiently complex idea is grounds for further research, even when the
possibilities of proof are non-existent. I say that more to the social
sciences than I do the theoretical physicists of the world, so perhaps I'm off
point here.

But my general idea is that, yes, philosophy can and should step it up a bit.

~~~
ianamartin
Just as a rough outline for how this could work, consider the following
syllogism:

All possible interactions are explained by Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

This particular observation is not explained by Einstein.

Therefore this must have a different explanation.

This gives us a testable proposition by definition.

This gives us proposition 2 to focus on and rebut, if we can.

Generally, I think this is how good science works, but it's not codified. An
additional benefit to this concept is that if stored in a central location, it
gives us a graph network to deal with and search through.

And it gives us a tree to look at. So anything invalidated higher up in the
tree invalidates all of its branches.

Which is also good.

------
dmfdmf
This crisis in Physics makes me happier than anyone can know. It signals the
end of the dominance of Kantian philosophy in Physics. Mach's principle
(Einstein's polestar), Popperian falsifiability, Cantor's paradise of infinity
(as described by Hilbert) and all other derivatives of Kant are the dead-end
of a false metaphysics and epistemology.

We do indeed, live in interesting (or depending on your worldview, dangerous)
times.

~~~
tmvphil
> derivatives of Kant are the dead-end of a false metaphysics and epistemology

Sounds like you've been reading too much Ayn Rand. Nobody else places as much
irrational blame on a single philosopher. Even if you think his philosophy is
wrong, its much less wrong than things that came before it, and is certainly
less wrong than claiming you can found a philosophy on 'A is A'.

~~~
IsaacL
There's a direct link from Kant to Hegel to Marx, and from Marx to all the
horrors communism brought into the world.

A separate link leads from Kant to Frege, Russell and modern analytic
philosophy. Which is hardly on the level of Marxism, and it still respects
reason and reality, but it led to the idea of logic as meaningless symbol
games, rather than a vital tool to understand the world.

Rand didn't found her whole philosophy on 'A is A' \- this is a common
misconception. She isn't trying to create a philosophy based on geometry,
where everything is deduced from a few axioms. The law of identity is
fundamental, but it's not sufficient - you need observation of reality too.

