

The Most Dangerous Ideas in Science - dj-wonk
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2015/01/27/381809832/the-most-dangerous-ideas-in-science

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dj-wonk
> Sean Carroll, a highly respected and philosophically astute physicist, takes
> a different approach from Dawid. For Carroll, it is the concept of
> falsifiability, which was central to Karl Popper's famous philosophy of
> science, that is too limited for the playing fields we now find ourselves
> working on.

>> "Whether or not we can observe [extra dimensions or other universes]
directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are
not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some a
priori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world
works, is as non-scientific as it gets."

> Thus for Carroll, even if a theory predicts entities which can't be directly
> observed, if there are indirect consequences of their existence we can
> confirm, then that those theories (and those entities) must be included in
> our considerations.

Sounds convincing to me. But, are there indirect consequences? That's the key,
in my opinion.

